LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 1 

Shelf .....Qp..^ 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



CREATION 




PRIM! TIVE NEBULA. 



CREATION 



THE BIBLICAL COSMOGONY IN THE 
LIGHT OF MODERN SCIENCE 



/by 
ARNOLD GUYOT, LL.D. 

BLAIR PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AND PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY IN THE 

COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY. AUTHOR OF " EARTH AND 

MAN." MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY 

OF SCIENCES OF AMERICA. ASSOCIATE 

MEMBER OF THE ROYAL 

ACADEMY OF TURIN, 

ETC., ETC. 



o.J.79- 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRLBNER'S SONS 

1884 







COPYKIGHT, 1884, BY 

CHAELES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



TROWS 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPAN/ 

NEW YORK. 



I 



TO MY BELOVED WIFE, 

WHOSE EVER READY HEART AND 

HAND, THROUGH GENTLE MINISTRY DURING 

LONG WEEKS OP TLLNESS, ALONE HAVE RENDERED 

POSSIBLE THE ISSUE OP THIS LITTLE BOOK, THESE LEAVES 

ARE OFFERED AS A TRIBUTE OF THE PROFOUND 

AFFECTION OF HER ATTACHED HUSBAND 

THE AUTHOR 






K 



PREFACE 



In - the beginning of the winter of 1840, 
having just finished writing a lecture on 
the Creation which was to be a part of a 
public course of Physical Geography that 
I was then delivering at Neuchatel, Swit- 
zerland, it flashed upon my mind that the 
outlines I had been tracing, guided by the 
results of scientific inquiry, then available, 
were precisely those of the grand history 
given in the First Chapter of Genesis. In 
the same hour I explained this remarkable 
coincidence to the intelligent audience 
which it was my privilege to address. 
Before that time, though acquainted with 



Vlll PREFACE. 

the principal attempts to put that most 
ancient writing in accordance with the 
geology of the day, I had found them en- 
tirely inadequate, and had suspended my 
judgment on the question — waiting for 
more light. 

A further study of this interesting sub- 
ject allowed me to perfect many a detail, 
and, though the general outlines remained 
the same, to perceive more and more the 
deep philosophical meaning of the plan 
and the connection of all the parts of that 
wonderful Record. 

Since that time I have been requested 
again and again to express these views, 
both in private and in public, but they 
first appeared in print in the Evening 
JPost, March, 1852, as a series of abstracts 
from a public course of lectures which I 
was delivering in New York. 



PREFACE. IX 

The substance of these articles fur- 
nished the foundation of an extensive 
critical review of the same ideas, by Eev. 
Dr. O. Means, in the JBibliotheca- Sacra of 
March and April, 1855, in connection with 
other proposed explanations of the bibli- 
cal account of creation. 

Later still I was called upon to lecture 
on this subject in the College of New 
Jersey ; and several years in succession in 
the Theological Seminary of Princeton. 
At the request of the Trustees of the 
Union Theological Seminary of New York, 
I expounded the same views in a course of 
twelve lectures, in the year 1866, on the 
Morse Foundation, then just established. 

Prof. J. D. Dana did me the honor to 
endorse them, almost in full, in his remark- 
able article, on " Science and the Bible," in 
the January number of the Bibliotheca- 



X PREFACE. 

Sacra, in 1856. He also adopted them in 
his manual of Geology, which first ap- 
peared in 1863. 

A complete though much condensed ex- 
position was given, by invitation, before 
the Evangelical Alliance assembled in New 
York, in 1873, which is found printed in 
the volume of its Proceedings, £Tew York, 
1874. 

These dates may serve to show that 
whatever be the value of this interpreta- 
tion, in making clear the true meaning and 
import of the First Chapter of Genesis, 
it has been worked out independently of 
later publications giving the same or simi- 
lar opinions. 

Having been repeatedly asked by intelli- 
gent laymen, as well as clergymen, where 
an exposition of my views could be found, 
it became evident to me that, owing to the 



PREFACE. XI 

limited circulation of the Evangelical Al- 
liance volume, the paper did not attain the 
full measure of its usefulness. This con- 
viction induced me to yield to the request 
to publish it in a more accessible and con- 
venient form, with such additions and il- 
lustrations as might elucidate the subject 
more fully. 

The results of the so-called modern, 
higher criticism, whose object is to shake 
the faith in the authenticity of the Book 
of Genesis, have not even been alluded to. 
These conclusions have often been fully 
refuted by more competent men than their 
authors. 

It seemed best to retain the synoptical 
character of the article. Experience has 
taught me that extended critical discus- 
sions on all the possible interpretations of 
the text, or on the philological meaning of 



Xll PREFACE. 

certain words, are likely to engender con- 
fusion and perplexity, rather than to estab- 
lish a definite and well-grounded conviction 
on the subject. 

I have faith in the power of a simple 
and clear presentation of the truth. Such 
an one has been attempted here. May my 
brother scientist, as well as the believer in 
the Bible, find in the following pages new 
reasons for accepting the truths contained 
in this sacred document as the revelation 
of a God of love to man. 

A. Guyot. 

Princeton, New Jersey, December, 1883. 



CONTENTS. 



i. 

PAGE 

Introduction, 1 

n. 

Plan of the Biblical Account of Ckeation, . 9 

in. 

What the Eecokd Teaches, 20 

IV. 

What Help can Modern Science give us in un- 
derstanding ARIGHT THE STATEMENTS OF THE 

Bd3le, and how do the two Becords com- 
pare? 24 

V. 

The Prologue, 29 

VI. 

The Primitive State of Matter when -First cre- 
ated, 33 

vn. 

The First Cosmogonic Day, 43 



XIV CONTENTS. 

VIII. 

PAGE 

Second Cosmogonic Day, 54 

IX. 
Third Cosmogonic Day, 72 

X. 

Third Cosmogonic Day continued, . . . .83 

XL 

Fourth Cosmogonic Day, 92 

xn. 

Fifth Cosmogonic Day, 95 

XIII. 
Sixth Cosmogonic Day, 120 

XTV. 
Sixth Cosmogonic Day continued, .... 122 

XV. 
The Seventh Day. The Sabbath of Creation, . 131 

XVI. 
Conclusions, 137 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



PLATE 

L- 

n.— 



in. 



Prtalltlve Nebula, . . . Frontispiece. 
Circular Nebula — Spiral Nebula, 

To face p. 65 
The Photosphere of the Earth Disap- 



PEARTNG, 


• 


To face p. 72 


W.— Silurian Age, . 




95 


V. — Devonian Age, 




103 


VI. — Carboniferous Age, 


• 


110 


"VU. — Mesozoic Age, 


• 


114 


VHT. — Tertiary Age (Dinotherium), 


118 


IX. — Tertiary Age (Mammoth), 


121 



The geological 'illustrations are engraved from photographs 
of original paintings, belonging to the series executed by B. W. 
Haickins, Sc.D., for the E. M. Museum of Geology and 
Archeology of the College of New Jersey, Princeton. 



CREATION; 

OR, 

THE BIBLICAL COSMOGONY IN THE LIGHT 
OF MODERN SCIENCE. 



I. 

INTRODUCTION. 



The Biblical Narrative and the Ancient Cosmogonies 
contrasted — The two Records : Bible and Nature — 
The time Method of the Interpretation of Both — Our 
Point of View. 

The sacred volume, containing the revela- 
tions that God, in his wisdom, chose to 
give to man, fitly opens with a short ac- 
count of the creation of the material 
world, animated nature, and of man him- 
self. On this great question of Creation, 



2 CREATION. 

which implies the relation of God to his 
creatures, of the finite to the infinite — a 
question insoluble for human philosophy 
— man had to be taught from on high. 

In all ages of history men have ac- 
knowledged the necessity of such a reve- 
lation. In the organized, primitive, as 
well as in the later communities, we al- 
ways find as a part of the religious code of 
laws on which the social order is founded, 
a similar history of the creation of the 
universe — a cosmogony — for which their 
authors claim, a divine origin. 

The Bible narrative, however, by its 
simplicity, its chaste, positive, historical 
character, is in perfect contrast with the 
fanciful, allegorical, intricate cosmogonies 
of all heathen religions, whether born in 
the highly civilized communities of Egypt, 
the Orient, Greece, or Rome, or among the 
savage tribes which still occupy a large 
portion of our planet. By its sublime 
grandeur, by its symmetrical plan, by the 



INTRODUCTION. 3 

profoundly philosophical disposition of its 
parts, and, perhaps, quite as much by its 
wonderful caution in the statement of 
facts, which leaves room for all scientific 
discoveries, it betrays the supreme guid- 
ance which directed the pen of the writer 
and kept it throughout within the limits 
of truth. 

In all these respects this most ancient of 
written documents deserves special atten- 
tion on the part of all enlightened minds, 
while the sacredness of its character 
doubles for us the duty of studying it in 
a reverent, but candid, impartial, and truth- 
loving spirit. 

Side by side, another manifestation of 
the same divine mind, the book of Nature, 
itself the work of God, is open to our 
curious gaze. To man alone, among all 
created beings, has been granted the privi- 
lege of reading in it, by patient and intel- 
ligent researches, the innumerable proofs 
of the almighty power and wisdom of its 



4 CREATION. 

author ; for man's mind alone, in the world 
known to us, is akin to the mind which de- 
vised the wonderful plan unfolded in that 
great Cosmos which we call Nature. 

Both these books, the Bible and Na- 
ture, are legitimate sources of knowledge ; 
but to read them aright we must remember 
the object and true character of their re- 
spective teachings, which are by no means 
the same. 

The chief design of the Bible, throughout 
the sacred volume, is to give us light upon 
the great truths needed for our spiritual 
life ; all the rest serves only as a means to 
that end, and is merely incidental. 

In the first chapter of Genesis, when 
describing in simple outlines the great 
phases of existence through which the 
universe and the earth have passed, the Bi- 
ble does not intend to reveal to us the pro- 
cesses by which they have been brought 
about, and which it is the province of as- 
tronomy, chemistry, and geology to dis- 



INTRODUCTION. 5 

cover; but, by a few authoritative state- 
ments, to put in a strong light the rela- 
tions of this finite, visible world to the 
spiritual, invisible world above, to God 
himself. Its teachings are essentially of 
a spiritual, religious character. 

Destined for men of all times and of all 
degrees of culture, its instructions are 
clothed in simple, popular language, which 
renders them accessible alike to the un- 
learned, to the cultivated man, and to the 
devotee of science. 

The knowledge we derive from Nature 
reaches us only by our senses. A faithful 
study of God's visible works, and sound 
deductions from the facts carefully ascer- 
tained are the foundations on which the 
science of nature rests. But from these 
finite premises no logical process can de- 
rive the great truths of the infinite, super- 
natural world which are given in the 
Biblical narrative. Nature's teachings, 
grand as they' are, belong to the finite 



6 CREATION. 

world, they are of a material and intel- 
lectual order, and cannot transcend their 
sphere. If the immensity of the boundless 
universe, in the midst of which we live, 
awakens in us the idea of the infinite, it 
cannot prove it, nor, governed as it is, by 
the necessary operation of invariable laws, 
can this visible world throw any light upon 
the mysteries of that invisible domain in 
which love and freedom reign supreme. 

Let us not, therefore, hope, much less 
ask, from science the knowledge which it 
can never give ; nor seek from the Bible the 
science which it does not intend to teach. 
Let us receive from the Bible, on trust, the 
fundamental truths to which human science 
cannot attain, and let the results of scientific 
inquiry serve as a running commentary to 
help us rightly to understand the compre- 
hensive statements of the Biblical account 
which refer to God's work during the 
grand week of creation. Thus we shall be 
convinced, if I do not greatly err, that the 



INTRODUCTION. 7 

two books, coming from the same Author, 
do not oppose, but complete one another, 
forming together the whole revelation of 
God to man. 

In reading the Biblical narrative, to 
cling to an interpretation obviously dis- 
proved by the testimony of God's works, 
as many well-meaning, but unwise believ- 
ers have done, is to refuse the light placed 
before us by God himself. On the other 
side, to decline, as many still do, a priori, 
to believe in the possibility of this antique 
document agreeing in its statements with 
modern science, because its author could not 
have had, it is supposed, such knowledge, 
before the discoveries of our day, is to be 
governed by a preconceived opinion. This 
question should be submitted to an impartial 
examination, as a question of fact. To do 
otherwise is as unscientific as it is unjust. 

If we do neither, but, without prejudice, 
faithfully use all the means of interpreta- 
tion at our disposal, we may hope to see 



8 CREATION. 

this question of fact decided in the affirm- 
ative, and the clouds which have ob- 
scured the majestic simplicity of that no- 
ble record dispelled forever. 

In offering a simple and clear exposi- 
tion of his own matured views, the writer 
is not without strong hope that the rea- 
sons which have determined his conviction 
may equally satisfy the minds of his fel- 
low-seekers after truth, whether in the 
domain of Nature, or in that of Holy Writ. 

Taking this view of the Biblical account 
of creation, and of the method of its inter- 
pretation, let us consider : 

The plan of the narrative. 

What it teaches. 

What help modern science, by its best 
results, can give us in understanding aright 
the concise statements of the Bible which 
relate to the method of creation. 

This last investigation will tell us 
whether or no, and in what measure, the 
two records differ or agree. 



II. 

PLAN OF THE BIBLICAL ACCOUNT OF CREATION. 

The document before us for examination 
begins with the first chapter of the Book 
of Genesis and ends with the third verse 
of the second chapter. It is complete in 
itself, forming: an organic whole which un- 
folds the history of the creation of the 
material universe and of living beings, in- 
eluding man as a part of nature. 

By the symmetrical regularity of its ar- 
rangement, by the tone of its language, 
and the specific use of certain words, it is 
stamped with an individuality not to be 
mistaken. In this the name of God is in 
the plural form, JElohim, the triune God 
of the universe, the Father, the Word, and 
the Spirit, who all appear in the work of 
creation. 



10 CREATION. 

In the second narrative, beginning with 
the fourth verse of the second chapter, 
which takes up, under another aspect, the 
creation of man as the head of the family 
of humanity, and specifically of the Jew- 
ish people, chosen by God as its spiritual 
representative, guardian of the true knowl- 
edge of God and of His oracles concerning 
the promised Redeemer, God's name is 
Jehovah. 

That difference in the name of the Crea- 
tor in the two documents, the Elohistic and 
the Jehovistic, as they have been termed, 
has caused many to believe that both were 
not due to the pen of the same author, or 
that Moses had before him two ancient 
documents which he simply admitted in 
his Book of Genesis. This may, or may 
not be so. It is not the place to discuss 
this question, since we only propose to ex- 
amine the first narrative in itself, without 
regard to the sources of information at the 
disposal of its author. We may say, how- 



BIBLICAL ACCOUNT OF CREATION. 11 

ever, that the obvious difference in the aim 
of each narrative seems sufficient to justify 
the difference in the expressions used in 
describing the creation of man and woman 
and in the name of the Creator, without 
recurring to a double authorship which is 
in itself improbable. 

The Biblical account of creation is not 
an ordinary narrative. The majesty of 
its simple and almost rhythmic language 
gives it the charm of a grand poem, with a 
prologue, a developing drama, and a tri- 
umphant conclusion. Moreover, a closer 
analysis reveals a plan profoundly philo- 
sophical, which has been too much over- 
looked by its expositors, but will be noted 
here, though its full signification will be 
shown hereafter. 

The history of Creation is given in the 
form of a grand cosmogonic week, with six 
creative or working days, preceded by an 
introduction, and closing with a day of 
rest — the Sabbath of God as a Creator. 



12 CREATION. 

Each day is marked by a special work, and 
begins with an evening followed by a 
morning. These six days are subdivided 
into two symmetrical series of three days 
each. Both series begin with Light — the 
diffused, cosmic light in the first, the con- 
centrated solar light in the second. In 
both series the third day has two works, 
while the others contain but one. The 
first series describes the arrangement of 
the material world — it is the Era of mat- 
ter / the second, the creation of organized 
beings, animals and man — it is the Era of 
life : two trilogies in this great drama of 
creation, corresponding to the two great 
spheres of existence which precede the 
historical age of man. Such symmetry of 
plan cannot be accidental : it is full of 
meaning, as we soon shall see. 

The following tableau will put in a clear 
light the symmetrical arrangement of the 
parts and the special work of each cos- 
mogonic day. 



BIBLICAL ACCOUNT OF CREATION. 13 

The translation of the text, here given, 
which adheres closely to the original, was 
made at my request by Prof. Henry C. 
Cameron, to whom I offer my sincere ac- 
knowledgment. 

THE PKOLOGUE. 

a. The Primordial Creation. 

In the beginning God created the Heavens and the 
Earth. 

b. The Primitive State of Matter. 

And the Earth was desolateness and emptiness, 
And darkness was upon the face of the deep, 
And the Spirit of God brooded upon the face of 
the waters. 

EKA OF MATTER 

FIRST COSMOGONIC DAY. 

Work. — First Activity of Hatter — Cosmic Light. 

And God said, " Let Light be," and Light was. 

And God saw the Light that it was good. 

And God separated the Light from the darkness. 



14 CREATION. 

And God called the Light Day, and the darkness 

he called Night. 
And evening was, and morning was, day one. 

SECOND COSMOGONIC DAY. 

Woek. — Organization of the Heavens. 

And God said, " Let there be an Expanse in the 

midst of the waters, 
And let it separate the waters from the waters." 
And God made the Expanse, 
And separated the waters under the Expanse from 

the waters above the Expanse. 
And it was so. 

And God called the Expanse Heavens. 
And evening was, and morning was, day second. 

THIED COSMOGONIC DAY. 
First Woek. — a. Formation of the Earth. 

And God said, "Let the waters under the Heavens 
be gathered to one place, 

And let the dry land appear." 

And it was so. 

And God called the dry land Earth, and the gather- 
ing of the waters called he Seas. 

And God saw that it was good. 



BIBLICAL ACCOUNT OF CREATION. 15 

Second Work. — b. The Plants. 

And God said, " Let the earth bring forth vegeta- 
tion, herb bearing seed, fruit tree yielding fruit 
after its kind whose seed is in it, upon the 
earth." 

And it was so. 

And the Earth brought forth vegetation, herb bear- 
ing seed after its kind, and tree yielding fruit 
whose seed is in it after its kind. 

And God saw that it was good. 

And evening was, and morning was, day third. 

EEA OF LIFE. 

FOURTH COSMOGONIC DAY. 

The Work. — The Solar Light. 

And God said, " Let luminaries be in the Expanse of 

the Heavens to separate the day from the night ; 

And let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for 

days and for years. 
And let them be for luminaries in the Expanse of 

the Heavens to give light upon the Earth." 
And it was so. 

And God made the two great luminaries, 
The great luminary for the dominion of the day, 
The small luminary for the dominion of the night ; 
The stars also. 



16 CREATION. 

And God placed them in the Expanse of the Heavens 

To give light upon the Earth, 

And to rule over the day and over the night 

And to separate the light from the darkness. 

And God saw that it was good. 

And evening was, and morning was, day fourth. 



FIFTH COSMOGONIC DAY. 

The Woek. — Creation of the Lower Animals, in 
Water and Air. 

And God said, " Let the waters teem with creeping 
creatures (swarm with swarmers), living beings, 

And let birds fly over the earth, across the face of 
the expanse of the heavens." 

And God created the great stretched-out sea mon- 
sters (tanninim), 

And all living creatures that creep, which the waters 
breed abundantly after their kind, 

And every winged bird after its kind. 

And God saw that it was good. 

And God blessed them, saying, 

" Be fruitful and multiply, 

And fill the waters in the seas, 

And let the birds multiply on the earth." 

And evening was, and morning was, day fifth. 



BIBLICAL ACCOUNT OF CREATION. 17 

SIXTH COSMOGONIC DAY. 

The First Work. — a. Creation of Higher Animals 
on Land. 

And God said, " Let the Earth bring forth the living 

creature after its kind, cattle and creeping 

things, 
And beasts of the earth after their kind." 
And it was so. 
And God made the beasts of the earth after their 

kind, 
And the cattle after their kind, 
And every creeping thing of the ground after its 

kind. 
And God saw that it was good. 

The Second Work. — b. Creation of Man. 

And God said, "Let us make man in our image, 

after our likeness, 
And let them have dominion over the fish of the 

sea, 
And over the birds of the heavens, 
And over the cattle, 
And over all the Earth, 
And over every creeping thing that creepeth upon 

the Earth." 



18 CREATION. 

And God created man in his image, 

In the image of God created he him ; 

Male and female created he them. 

And God blessed them. 

And God said to them, 

" Be fruitful and multiply 

And fill the earth and subdue it, 

And have dominion over the fish of the sea 

And over the birds of the heavens, 

And over every living creature that creepeth upon 
the earth." 

And God said, " Behold, I have given to you every 
herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all 
the earth, 

And every tree in which is the fruit of the tree yield- 
ing seed ; 

To you they shall be for food. 

And to every living creature of the earth, 

And to every bird of the heavens, 

And to every thing that creepeth upon the earth in 
which there is life, , 

I have given every green herb for food." 

And it was so. 

And God saw all that he had made, and behold it 
was very good. 

And evening was, and morning was, day the sixth. 



BIBLICAL ACCOUNT OF CREATION. 19 

SEVENTH COSMOGONIC DAY. 

No Woke. — Conclusion— The Sabbath. 

Thus the Heavens and the Earth were finished, 

And all the host of them. 

And on the seventh day God ended his work which 

he had made ; 
And he rested on the seventh day from all his work 

which he had made. 
And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, 
For in it he rested from all his work which God had 

created and made. 

Such is the regular plan of that opening 
chapter of the Holy Scriptures. Before 
we enter, however, into the consideration 
of its details, which to be well understood 
may require some explanation, let us see 
what are the great spiritual teachings 
which are obvious to all. 



III. 

WHAT THE RECORD TEACHES. 

The great spiritual truths emphatically 
taught by the narrative are : a personal 
God, calling into existence by his free, 
almiglity will, manifested by his word, 
executed by his spirit, things which had no 
being ; a Creator distinct from his creation ; 
a universe, not eternal, but which had a be- 
ginning in time ; a creation successive — 
the six days; and progressive — beginning 
with the lowest element, matter, continu- 
ing by the plant and animal life, terminat- 
ing with man, made in God's image ; thus 
marking the great steps through which 
God, in the course of ages, gradually real- 
ized the vast organic plan of the Cosmos we 
now behold in its completeness and unity, 
and which he declared to be very good. 



WHAT THE RECORD TEACHES. 21 

These are the fundamental spiritual 
truths which have enlightened men of all 
ages on the true relations of God to his 
creation and to man. To understand them 
fully, to be comforted by them, requires 
no astronomy nor geology. To depart 
from them is to relapse into the cold, unin- 
telligent fatalism of the old pantheistic re- 
ligions and modern philosophies, or to fall 
from the upper regions of light and love 
infinite into the dark abysses of an unavoid- 
able skepticism. 

Accepted by man, these simple truths 
already form a code of religious doctrines 
which free him forever from the dread of 
the blind, irresistible forces of nature, 
whose worship is the foundation of all the 
polytheistic religions of antiquity ; for he 
knows Nature to be not a huge, all-power- 
ful, unconscious, unfeeling despot, but a 
creature of God, governed by His laws and 
subject to His supreme will. 

Adding to these teachings those in the 



22 CREATION. 

second chapter, the great fact of the fall 
of man and the promise of a Kedeemer, we 
have the Primitive Gospel the JProt-evan- 
geliitm of the antediluvian Patriarchs, the 
preservation of which was the object of 
the election of Noah as the head of the 
new spiritual humanity, after the destruc- 
tion, by the Deluge, of the unfaithful, and 
of the call of Abraham, another believer 
in that Primitive Gospel, whose descend- 
ants were to keep that blessed knowledge 
until the coming of Christ. 



But thinking men, as well as men of sci- 
ence, crave still another view of this narra- 
tive ; an intellectual view we may call it. 
They wish fully to understand the meaning 
of the text when it describes the physical 
phenomena of creation. 

Are the statements relating to them a 
sort of parable to convey the spiritual 



WHAT THE RECORD TEACHES. 23 

truths just mentioned, or are they facts 
which correspond to those furnished by 
the results of scientific inquiry ? 

The answer to this question brings us 
to our third point, the treatment of which 
will occupy the remainder of these pages. 



IV. 



WHAT HELP CAN MODERN SCIENCE GIVE US IN 
UNDERSTANDING ARIGHT THE STATEMENTS 
OF THE BIBLE, AND HOW DO THE TWO REC- 
ORDS COMPARE? 

At first sight, the difficulties are not few. 
The holy record speaks of the light before 
the sun ; of days with an evening and 
morning, before our great luminary could 
give a measure of time for them; of a 
firmament which separates the waters from 
the waters ; of the earth with its continents 
and seas, preceding the sun and moon ; of 
plants growing without the sunlight neces- 
sary to their existence. These are prob- 
lems which require a solution. 

Many, attempting to make the great pe- 
riods of geology to correspond to the six 
creative days, failing to see that Moses 



MODERN SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE. 25 

confines the whole of palaeontological geol- 
ogy, from the beginning of life in the Cam- 
brian and Silurian, up to the Tertiary and 
Quaternary ages within the fifth and the 
sixth Cosmogonic days, could not, of course, 
find any correspondence and gave up the 
narrative in despair. Some have tried to 
obviate these difficulties by supposing a 
gap between the act of primordial creation 
and the work of the first day — a vast gulf 
into which they sink all the astronomy and 
geology of the past ages. 

Others believe the narrative to be an 
accommodation to cosmogonic ideas cur- 
rent at the time it was written. Others 
again make it an ideal history having no 
connection with real facts in nature. 
Some have even gone so far as to conceive 
it to be a series of local phenomena which 
occurred during six days of twenty -four 
hours, representing phases analogous to 
those through which the earth has passed, 
thus disavowing its cosmogonic character as 



26 CREATION. 

a history of the universe and the earth, and 
making of the account a pretended history 
of six solar days, founded upon imaginary 
facts of which geology has no knowledge. 

As neither this pretended history nor 
the true one could have been witnessed by 
any human being, man having been created 
last, it is not conceivable that God should 
have chosen that mode of revelation rather 
than the true history of the creation. 

Two fundamental errors, both refuted 
by Moses himself, as we shall hereafter 
see, have caused these misinterpretations. 
First, that the history of the earth begins 
at the second verse, discarding therefore 
the organization of the heavens and mis- 
applying the work of the first and second 
day to the earth alone. 

Second, making the six cosmogonic days 
solar days of twenty -four hours, whereas, 
according to the text, such days could only 
exist after the appearance of the sun on 
the fourth cosmogonic day. 



MODERN SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE. 27 

We have no right to treat such a docu- 
ment lightly, when the holy writer de- 
clares that, u Thus the heavens and the 
earth were finished, and all the host of 
them" (Gen. ii. 1); and again, " These 
are the generations of the heavens and of 
the earth" (Gen. ii. 4), we must accept 
this solemn declaration, and believe that 
he intends to give us a veritable history of 
both. 

Guided by this view, we shall consider 
the cosmogonic days as the organic phases, 
or the great periods of the history of the 
universe, and not of the earth alone, and 
look for the special work done in each, in 
the order indicated by Moses, viz., the 
primordial creation and primitive state of 
matter, first ; Light as the beginning of the 
activity of matter and the organization of 
the heavens, next; the formation of the 
terrestrial globe of the earth, after, and the 
appearance of the sun and of organic life, 
with man, last. 



28 CREATION. 

After using faithfully all the light 
which the present science can shed upon 
each of these great topics, we may hope to 
be able to say with Moses : " These are the 
generations of the heavens and of the 
earth." 

Let us now examine each portion of 
the narrative by itself, beginning with the 
prologue. 



V. 

THE PROLOGUE. 

The Introduction to the work of the six 
days is comprised in the first and second 
verses, in which are recorded : 

a. The primordial creation of the matter 
of the universe. 

b. A description of the original state of 
matter when first created. 

a. In the first verse we are taught that 
this universe had a beginning ; that it was 
created — that is, called into existence — and 
that God was its creator. The central idea 
is creation. The Hebrew word is bard, 
translated by create. It has been doubted 
whether the word meant a creation, in the 
sense that the world was not derived from 
any pre-existing material, nor from the 



30 CREATION. 

substance of God himself ; but the manner 
in which it is here used does not seem to 
justify such a doubt. For whatever be the 
use of the word bard in other parts of the 
Bible, it is employed in this chapter in a 
discriminating way, which is very remark- 
able, and cannot but be intentional. It oc- 
curs on only three occasions, the first crea- 
tion of matter in the first verse, the first 
introduction of life in the fifth day ; and 
the creation of man in the sixth day. 

Elsewhere, when only transformations 
are meant, as in the second and fourth 
days, or a continuation of the same kind 
of creation, as in the land animals of the 
fifth day, the word asdh (make) is used. 
Bard is thus reserved for marking the first 
introduction of each of the three great 
spheres of existence — the world of matter, 
the world of life, and the spiritual world, 
represented by man in this visible economy 
— all three of which, though intimately 
associated, are profoundly distinct in es- 



THE PROLOGUE. 31 

sence, and together constitute all the uni- 
verse known to us. 

Again, it is a significant fact that in 
the whole Bible where the simple form of 
bard is used it is always with reference to 
a work made by God, but never by man. 

What have science and philosophy to , 
say about it ? Absolutely nothing. Crea- 
tion out of nothing is a fact beyond their 
pale ; it is the miracle of miracles. Both 
science and philosophy must start from ex- 
isting premises, and nothing is no premise. 
Their universal, logical, conclusion, there- 
fore, is that what is always was, in some 
form ; and what is here called creation is 
but transformation, and, if so, that the 
Universe is God, or of God's substance. 

Whether we conceive, with the Brah- 
min, that the material universe is an ema- 
nation from the Deity ; or, with the old 
Egyptians, that it is itself a developing 
God; or, with modern materialism, that 
it is the sole existing substance, and the 



32 CREATION. 

source of all the phenomena ever observed 
in nature and in man, pantheism and ma- 
terialism are at the door, with all their in- 
ternal impossibilities, and with all the con- 
tradictions they engender in the bosom of 
the free, moral, spiritual being, in the heart 
of humanity. 

We have, therefore, to accept, on trust, 
the truth of creation as an ultimate fact, 
not to be reached by any reasoning pro- 
cess, but which, being accepted, makes 
clear to the mind and heart the relations 
of the universe, and of man to God. Thus 
Paul's declaration remains forever true : 
" Through faith we understand that the 
worlds were framed by the word of God." 

Hence the necessity of a direct revela- 
tion of these fundamental truths, to which 
human wisdom could not attain in any 
other way, and which without the sanction 
of God's word were doomed to remain sim- 
ple hypotheses, incapable of proof. 



VI. 



THE PRIMITIVE STATE OF MATTER WHEN FIRST 
CREATED. 

h. This is described in the second verse: 
"And the earth was desolateness and 
emptiness ; and darkness was upon the 
face of the deep; and the Spirit of God 
brooded upon the face of the waters." 

Two words here — the earth and the wa- 
ters — must be rightly interpreted before we 
can proceed with safety. After the majes- 
tic exordium in the first verse, embracing 
the whole creation, it is not without some 
surprise that in the second verse we find 
the narrative apparently confined to our 
little planet. But does (erets) the earth 
mean here our terrestrial globe, with its 
lands and seas, already individualized, sep- 
arated from the rest of the universe, and 



34 CREATION. 

the organization of which is mentioned 
later as the special work of the third day ? 
I think not. The reasons for this con- 
clusion are many. 

1st. If erets were here the earth, we 
should have to consider the works of the 
first and second creative days as referring 
to the earth alone, and should be com- 
pelled to renounce the idea that the Bibli- 
cal record intends to give us, as Moses de- 
clares, the generations of the heavens and 
of the earth — that is, a real cosmogony. 

2d. In this case all that is found in it is 
but a geological history of our globe. 

3d. Thus leaving out the heavens is at 
variance, not only with the declaration 
of Moses, but with the tenor of all the an- 
cient cosmogonies of which that of the first 
chapter of Genesis may be regarded as a 
prototype. 

4th. This would render, as we shall see, 
the reconciliation with the scientific facts, 
determined by physics and astronomy, for 



THE PRIMITIVE STATE OF MATTER. 35 

explaining the first and second day. very- 
difficult, if not impossible. 

5th. If the description of matter given 
in the second verse is meant to apply to a 
terraqueous globe, as some imagine, this 
state of things was no real beginning, but 
the result either of the destruction of a 
previous earth, or a medley of elements 
only partially combined. ■ 

All these difficulties disappear as soon 
as we admit that in the second verse erets 
is an equivalent for matter in general. 
The use of the concrete word earth, in- 
stead of the generic, or abstract, word 
matter, is common in most languages and 
was here a necessity, as such a word as 
matter does not exist in the Hebrew 
tongue. For all these reasons, we feel, 
therefore, justified in understanding erets 
in this early stage of the history of the 
universe, as meaning the primordial cos- 
mic material out of which God's Spirit, 
brooding upon the waters, was going to 






36 CREATION. 

organize, at the bidding of His Almighty 
Word, the universe and the earth. 

The same may be said of the waters of 
the second verse. The Hebrew word 
maim does not necessarily mean waters, 
but applies as well to the gaseous atmos- 
phere ; it is simply descriptive of the state 
of cosmic matter comprised in the word 
earth. These waters are the subtle, ethe- 
real, fluid which, in the cosmogony of the 
ancient Egyptians, was supposed to extend 
beyond the boundaries of the visible uni- 
verse, whose material had been drawn 
from that vast reservoir of all existence. 
The Bible itself gives us, in the Book of 
Job, in the Prophets, and in the Psalms, 
ample proofs of the familiarity of their 
authors with that grand conception which, 
being accepted by them, teaches us the 
true interpretation of the Geuesiac ac- 
count. 

No more convincing example of the na- 
ture of the cosmogonic ideas which were 



THE PRIMITIVE STATE OF MATTER. 37 

current among the biblical writers, who no 
doubt derived them from Genesis, can be 
cited than the words of David in the 
148th Psalm. 

The Psalmist invites all creatures of 
God to praise Him ; dividing them into 
two classes, " those of the heavens and 
those of the earth," and naming them in 
the order of their rank from the earth 
upward. " Praise ye the Lord from the 
heavens : praise ye Him, sun and moon : 
praise ye Him, all ye stars of light ; " 
and, going still higher, "Praise Him, ye 
heavens of heavens ; " and, last and high- 
est, "ye waters that be above the heav- 
ens." These evidently are the " waters " 
of Genesis which precede the light, the 
firmament of heaven, and the earth and 
the seas. Reading a few lines farther, 
we have the proof that the Psalmist does 
not confound these waters above the heav- 
ens with the terrestrial waters of the seas 
and the atmosphere, for, calling upon the 



38 CREATION. 

things of earth to praise the Lord, he 
names the dragons, and all deeps — the 
seas — fire, hail, vapors, and winds. 

The sense of these two words being thus 
settled, every word of the second verse be- 
comes clear and natural. The matter just 
created was gaseous ; it was without form, 
for the property of gas is to expand in- 
definitely. It was void, or empty, because 
apparently homogeneous and invisible. It 
was dark, because as yet inactive, light be- 
ing the result of the action of physical and 
chemical forces not yet awakened. It was 
a deep, for its expansion in space, though 
indefinite, was not infinite, and it had di- 
mensions. And the Spirit of God moved 
upon the face (outside, and not inside, as the 
pantheist would have it) of that vast, inert, 
gaseous mass, ready to impart to it motion, 
and to direct all its subsequent activity, 
according to a plan gradually revealed by 
the works of the great cosmic days, the true 
nature of which we shall try to explain. 



THE PRIMITIVE STATE OP MATTER. 39 

The central idea of the second verse is 
the state of matter when first created. 
The description applies, therefore, to the 
matter of the universe and not to that 
of the earth alone. The distorted and 
forced interpretations which have ob- 
scured the first part of the Mosaic account 
nearly all arise from the fundamental 
error which, is here corrected. There is 
no gap between the first and second 
verses ; no more than in any other part of 
the narrative. And we shall try to show 
that the Grenesiac account is throughout, a 
consistent history of constant, regular, and 
uninterrupted progress, from this chaotic 
beginning to the creation of man. 

Such is the statement of Moses as to the 
original condition of matter, and science 
does not tell a different story. Minerals, 
plants, animals — all bodies of nature — are 
compound results of processes which speak 
of a previous condition. By decomposing 
them, and undoing what has been done be- 



40 CREATION. 

fore, we finally arrive at the simple chemi- 
cal elements which are the substratum of 
all bodies. The same again may be said of 
the three forms of matter — solid, liquid, 
and gaseous. The least defined — the one in 
which the atoms are the most free — is the 
gaseous. All bodies in nature can be re- 
duced to this, the simplest of the forms of 
matter. Herschel, La Place, Arago, and 
Alexander, therefore, among astronomers; 
Ampere, among physicists ; Becquerel and 
Thenard, among chemists; Cuvier and 
Humboldt, among geologists, all have ar- 
rived at the same conclusion, that this un- 
compoundecl, homogeneous, gaseous condi- 
tion of matter must have been the begin- 
ning of the universe. 

But by a second statement, Moses adds 
to these material elements another, entirely 
distinct from them, viz., the presence of 
God's Spirit as the source of movement in 
that limitless mass of matter. In no part 
of the narrative does God appear inactive. 



THE PEIMITIVE STATE OF MATTER. 41 

Distinct in essence from his works, lie calls 
them into existence by his will, manifested 
by his word, sustaining and organizing 
them by his supreme intelligence, and sanc- 
tioning them by his approval. The idea 
of God creating the universe as a perfect 
machine, acting automatically throughout 
the ages, according to laws established by 
himself, whose government he gives up, is 
entirely absent. 

What does science say in regard to 
it? 

The answer to this grave question must 
be postponed, for we shall be better able 
to discuss it when life is introduced into 
the world. 

Meanwhile we will only remark that this 
view is not in the least inconsistent with 
the stability and the permanency of nature's 
physical laws ; no more than when man 
uses gravitation, electricity, heat, etc., to 
obtain effects which the combination of 
these forces, acting according to their im- 



42 CREATION". 

mutable laws, but left to themselves, would 
never produce. 

Man cannot create the least particle of 
material force, or change its nature ; this 
is God's province. But if these forces were 
not acting uniformly, and if we could not 
count upon their perfect stability, the 
world of human art and science would be- 
come impossible. 

The complicated engine which produces 
such marvellous effects is not the result of 
the material elements of which it is com- 
posed, and the physical forces used in it, 
but it is the work of the mind of the en- 
gineer adapting them to his purpose. 



VII. 

THE FIRST COSMOGONIC DAY. 

Light Appeaes. 
" And God said, Let there be Light and Light was." 

We now have a starting-point, but yet no 
activity, no progress. All beginnings are 
in darkness and silence. The era of prog- 
ress opens with the first day's work. At 
God's command, movement begins and the 
first result is the production of light. This 
was no creation, but a simple manifestation 
of the activity of matter ; for, according to 
modern physics, heat and light are but dif- 
ferent intensities of the vibratory motions 
of matter. 

To understand the process, let us also 
note that the present theory of light re- 
quires the presence of a general ethereal 



■ 



44 CREATION. 

medium, in which matter is plunged, by 
which, it is penetrated, and which, by its 
vibration, is capable of transmitting move- 
ment to all parts of the universe. 

Are matter and force one and. the same, 
or is matter a sub-stratum and an instru- 
ment for force, as the body is for the 
mind ? 

This vexed metaphysical question is not 
likely ever to be solved. If we incline to 
the last view we may conceive that God 
then endowed inert matter with the forces 
which we find always associated with it — 
gravitation, the general quantitative force, 
and the specific qualitative forces and their 
correlatives. Under the uniform action of 
gravitation, which tends to unity, and from 
which no molecule can be screened by an 
interposing body, that immeasurable mass 
of gaseous matter contracts. In this pro- 
cess, latent heat is given out, atoms con- 
glomerate into molecules ; nearer approach 
begets continual chemical combinations on 



THE FIRST COSMOGONIC DAY. 45 

a multitude of points. In the more con- 
centrated parts, heat is intensified and light 
is produced ; and the result is the appear- 
ance in the dark space of heaven of a large 
luminous mass — the primitive, grand nebula 
— the prototype of those thousands of lu- 
minous clouds observed by the astronomer 
floating in the empty wastes within and 
beyond our starry heavens. 

Though most of the nebulae, viewed 
through the powerful telescopes of this 
scientific age, have been found to be clus- 
ters of distant or small stars, because far 
advanced in their development, the lumi- 
nous gas forming the transparent body of 
many comets — the Zodiacal light, perhaps 
— and other gaseous heavenly bodies may 
serve to illustrate the condition of that 
primitive nebula. 

The effect would be the same if, as some 
surmise, the nebula was composed of in- 
numerable solid particles iu a state of in- 
candescence. 



46 CREATION. 

The words of the text would equally 
apply to the formation of several similar 
nebulsG in various parts of the heavens. 

Thus " God separated the light from the 
darkness " — that is, the light of the neb- 
ula from the dark outside matter, as yet 
inactive, and from the empty space around. 
"And God called the light day, and the 
darkness he called night." Both words are 
here specific names used without reference 
to any period or succession of time. 

The evening and the morning mark the 
beginning and the end of a day. At first 
sight, it seems that the order ought to be 
reversed, but it must be remembered that 
the beginning of that first great phase of 
development was the time of chaotic dark- 
ness, while the glorious morning which 
follows indicates the time during which 
the gradual illumination of that vast neb- 
ula is performed, aod the change from 
darkness to light is effected. It was thus, 
in the nature of the process, that the even- 



THE FIRST COSMOGONIC DAY. 47 

ing actually preceded the morning, and so 
Moses expresses it. It is not, therefore, as 
some think, because of the custom of the 
Jews to reckon the beginning of the day 
from the eve preceding, but more prob- 
ably the Jews derived that usage from the 
Genesiac account. 

Each subsequent cosmogonic day has 
also its evening and morning, for each 
transformation of a phase of development 
into another implies a partial destruction 
of the preceding one, inaugurating a period 
of relative darkness followed by one of 
greater perfection. 

Such was the first day, opening the se- 
ries of works of that grand cosmogonic 
week; the first great period of develop- 
ment, under God's guidance, of that world 
of matter just created. A day, the dura- 
tion of which was not measured by the 
course of the sun, which did not exist, nor 
by any definite length of time, but by the 
work accomplished in it. 



48 CREATION. 

"And God saw the light that it was 
goody 

The Creator thus approves his own work 
as suited to his further purposes. 



Strange as it may seem to any one ac- 
quainted with God's work and his method 
in creation, one of the most serious obsta- 
cles, for the greatest number, in perceiv : 
ing the harmony of the Biblical account 
with the observed facts deduced from sci- 
ence was, until lately, and even to this day, 
the question of the length of the six crea- 
tive days. Are these days solar days of 
twenty-four hours, so called natural days, 
and has the whole creation been finished 
in an ordinary week, or are they periods 
of indefinite length of time? 
I That the general reader, not looking 
deep into the subject, should have been 
satisfied to regard the creative days as so- 



THE FIRST COSMOGONIC DAY. 49 

called natural days, is easily conceivable. 
It is less easy to understand that distin- 
guished divines, and learned commentators, 
should have employed the greatest ingenu- 
ity in trying, often by the most extraordi- 
nary arguments, to defend the prima facie 
meaning of the text. Some have even im- 
agined, for the purpose, a fanciful history 
of the earth, of which geology knows noth- 
ing. One of the most gifted and popular 
authors of this class goes so far as to give, 
as the true history, taught by the Bible, 
an aimless reiteration of the astronomical 
and geological phenomena which might 
have occurred, during six times twenty- 
four hours, in the little corner of the 
earth, where man was created, at the end 
of these six days. 

It should be said, however, in justice to 
that class of expositors of the first chapter 
of Genesis, that the geological history of 
the earth had not then acquired the solid 
foundation of facts on which it now rests. 

4 



50 CKEATION. 

The tenacity with which the idea was 
held, that the six creative days could pos- 
sibly be solar days, only shows the force of 
first impressions and transmitted habits, 
for its correctness is disproved in the most 
absolute manner by the text and the whole 
tenor of the Biblical record, as well as by 
the study of nature. 

The reference in the Decalogue, to the 
seventh cosmogonic day as a foundation 
for the Sabbath of man, was another stum- 
bling-block, as, at first sight, it suggests a 
complete similarity of the two Sabbaths. 

This difficulty will be considered here- 
after. 

The Hebrew word yom (day) is used in 
this chapter in five different senses, just as 
we use the word day in common language : 

1. The day, meaning light, cosmic light, 
without reference to time or succession. 

2. The cosmogonic day, the nature of 
which is now to be determined. 

3. The day of twenty -four hours which 



THE FIRST COSMOGONIC DAY. 51 

begins in the fourth cosmogonic day, 
where it is said of the sun and moon, 
" Let them be for days and for seasons 
and for years." 

4. The light part of the same day of 
twenty-four hours, as opposed to the 
night. 

5. In Genesis ii., 4, in the day that the 
Lord God made the heavens and the 
earth, embracing the week of creation, or 
an indefinite period of time. 

The days of twenty-four and twelve 
hours, which require the presence of the 
sun, are excluded from the first three 
cosmogonic days, since the sun made its 
appearance only on the fourth day. No 
reason is apparent in the text why the last 
two days should be of a different nature 
from the others, while the geological his- 
tory of the creation of animals and man 
demonstrates that they are long, indefinite 
periods of time. The word day, as light 
opposed to darkness, in the first day, and 



52 CREATION. 

again as used in the fifth sense, as embrac- 
ing the whole creative week, has no appli- 
cation here. The cosmogonic day, there- 
fore, only remains, and its special sense is 
to be determined by its nature. 

We have seen already that each of these 
days is marked by a work, and each work 
is one of the great steps in the realization 
of God's plan — one of the great changes 
which constitute the organic phases of 
that history. Time is here without im- 
portance. It is given long or short as 
needed. As God's works are done by 
means and processes which we can study, 
that study tells us that for each of those 
great works of the creative days, their 
Author, before whom a thousand years are 
as one day, — has chosen to employ ages to 
bring them to perfection. 

As in the growth of the plant we dis- 
tinguish the germinating, the leafing, the 
flowering, and the seeding processes, as 
so many organic phases which might be 



THE FIRST COSMOGONIC DAY. 53 

called the days of the plant's history, 
without reference to the length of time 
allotted to each, so we have here the day 
of the cosmic light, the day of the heavens, 
the day of the earth, the day of the solar 
light, the day of the lower animals, and 
the day of the mammals and man ; which 
are really the great phases of God's creation. 



VIII. 

SECOND COSMOGONIC DAY. 

The Organization of the Heavens. 

" And God said, Let there be an expanse (firmament) in 
the midst of the waters, and let it separate the 
waters from the waters ; and God called the expanse 
Heavens. And the evening and the morning were 
the second day." 

It is to be regretted that tlie English ver- 
sion has translated the Hebrew word 
rakiah (expanse) by the word firmament 
This is due to the influence of the Latin 
Vulgate, which has firmamentum as the 
equivalent of the inexact arspeofia of the 
Septuagint. This last word refers to the 
current Egyptian conception of a solid 
vault of heaven, separating the lower visi- 
ble world from the upper world of subtle, 
invisible matter beyond. This view was 



SECOND COSMOGONIC DAY. 00 

held by the Greek translators, but is not 
warranted by the Hebrew text, and ren- 
ders it unintelligible. If it were correct, 
how could it be said that God called that 
solid vault " heavens " ? ; and further, verse 
20, that God created the birds to fly in the 
open "firmament" of heaven? In both 
cases expanse is evidently the fitting word. 
The second cosmogonic day has been 
another stumbling-block to commentators. 
The difficulties they have created for them- 
selves arose, as I have explained above, 
from depriving it of its cosmogonic char- 
acter and belittling it by reducing the 
great phenomena there described to simple 
modifications of the terrestrial atmosphere. 
In doing so, they find no other explanation 
for the waters above and the waters below 
the heavens, than to consider the first as 
the clouds, the second as the seas, separated 
by an expanse of transparent air which 
is called the heavens. They forget how 
small a part of the earth is the total atmos- 



56 CREATION. 

phere which surrounds it as a thin pellicle. 
They forget that this thin covering of 
clouds is but a temporary and ever-chang- 
ing one ; and that the clouds are in that 
heaven rather than above it. They do not 
comprehend how small a heaven it is in 
which it is said, a few lines farther on, 
that the birds are flying. They forget 
that this is not the true heavens in which 
are spread the sun and moon and stars. 
They refuse to be taught by the Psalmist, 
whose clear and positive description gives, 
in the 148th Psalm, just quoted, the very 
order in which these various envelopes 
of our earth succeed each other, and in 
which the terrestrial phenomena, clouds, 
rains, hail, and winds, are so sharply defined 
as being below the heavens whence shines 
the sun and moon and stars; and where 
these last are said to be surmounted by the 
heavens of heavens and the waters above 
the heavens. All these are the successive, 
concentric heavens, each one surpassing 



SECOND COSMOGONIC DAY. 57 

the other in immensity, the idea of which 
was so familiar to the Egyptian and other 
ancient cosmogonies, and whose echoes we 
find so often throughout the Bible. 

The organization of these heavens, to- 
gether with the innumerable shining bodies 
which animate them, and not the narrow 
space between the clouds and the earth, 
is the worthy object of the work of the 
second cosmogonic day. 

This grand day, so dwarfed and misun- 
derstood, is the one in which are described 
the generations of the heavens, announced 
by Moses, which otherwise find no place 
in the narrative of the creative week. 
For on the fourth day, when the sun and 
moon are made to appear for the use of 
the life-system, viz.: the days and the years 
and the seasons, the word heavens is men- 
tioned simply as the already existing space 
in which these bodies are placed. 

We find a confirmation of this view of 
the second day in the nature of nearly all 



58 CREATION. 

the ancient, oriental cosmogonies. In com- 
paring the most important of them, we 
find traits of resemblance which seem to 
indicate that they had a common origin in 
earlier traditions, of which Moses' narra- 
tive is the true prototype, while the others 
give us only features distorted by the 
imagination of their authors. But all are 
intended to give the development of the 
universe of which the earth is mentioned 
as only a part. 

The Egyptian cosmogony, the outlines 
of which bear the most resemblance to the 
Mosaic, may serve as an example. 

The Egyptians conceived the whole uni- 
verse as a gradually developing deity, com- 
posed of four great elements; the primi- 
tive spirit, or Kneph ; the primitive matter, 
Neith; the primitive time, Sevech; and the 
primitive space, JPascht ; none of which 
could be derived from the other, and which 
together constitute the one primitive god 
— a sort of quaternity, all the elements of 



SECOND COSMOGONIC DAY. 59 

which are material. In this conception 
the spirit was not distinguished from mat- 
ter, as it is in the modern sense of these 
words. 

The universe to be developed was fig- 
ured under the form of a great ball — the 
primitive egg — surrounded by the most 
subtle substance, the Kneph, brooding over 
it and preparing it for the further trans- 
formations. 

In the bosom of this invisible deity, 
separate themselves, in the course of long 
ages, the coarser, material elements, out of 
which the visible universe is to be shaped 
by gradual development. The first prod- 
uct of the alliance of Kneph and Neitli, 
spirit and matter, was jPhtah, the primi- 
tive fire, under the action of which all the 
activity and life in that inner world were 
developed. 

The next step was the separation of that 
vast material into two divinities — the vault 
of heaven, the firmament, Pe; the mass 



60 CREATION. 

of the earth, Anuhe, as yet unformed. 
Above the vault of heaven were the subtle, 
dark, ethereal substances of the primitive 
invisible deity. These were the waters 
above the heavens spoken of by most of 
the ancient cosmogonies. The masses of 
matter below, especially Anuke, were the 
waters under the heavens, out of which 
the sun and moon were next developed. 

All these transformations consumed long 
periods of time. The duration of the first 
period, that of JPhtah, or the universal 
light, could not be determined, say the 
Egyptians, because there was no sun to 
measure it. With the formation of the 
sun two new deities appear, Sate, or the 
illuminated half of the ball, and Hator, 
the dark half, deprived of the rays of the 
sun. After these, the gradual organization 
of the earth took place, the earth occupy- 
ing the centre of the universe. 

It is evident that all these so-called 
deities are no persons, but personified cos- 



SECOND COSMOGONIC DAY. 61 

mical ideas, or individualizations of parts 
of nature, the relations of which are figured 
by genetic connections, and forming to- 
gether a vast and complicated material 
polytheism, which finally embraces also 
the life-system and the animal worship so 
characteristic of Egypt. 

Let us note here the external points of 
resemblance between this degenerate cos- 
mogony and that of the Bible, its proto- 
type. 

In the Egyptian : 

1. The original gaseous form, and the 
darkness of matter. 

2. The successive transformations. 

3. Phtah, the light, as the first step in 
this development. 

4. The separation of the visible from 
the invisible universe, or, the waters below 
and the waters above the expanse. 

5. The periods of development of indefi- 
nite length. 



62 CREATION. 

6. The sun, moon, and earth organized 
last. 

But inwardly what profound contrasts ! 

The Bible knows : 

1. God, the living God, the personal 
Creator, calling the universe into existence, 
instead of a mass of matter, eternal, un- 
conscious, self -developing into a material 
world. 

2. God distinct and above His creatures, 
preceding them in time and governing 
them by His supreme will, instead of one 
confounded with them and developing with 
them. 

3. God ordering by His word and exe- 
cuting by His will every transformation. 

4. God working according to a precon- 
ceived plan toward an aim which, when 
realized, is declared by Him very good, 
instead of a world growing by an auto- 
matic development. 



SECOND COSMOGONIC DAY. 63 

In the heathen cosmogonies Nature's 
law governs; it is the law of necessity. 
In the Biblical cosmogony God reigns su- 
preme. Nature is under the law of His 
free will and liberty. 

Let us now see what science can tell us 
about the organization of the heavens. 

The central idea of this day's work is 
division or separation. The vast primitive 
nebula of the first day breaks up into a 
multitude of gaseous masses, and these are 
concentrated into stars. Motion is every- 
where.. Gravitation and the chemical 
forces tend to concentrate matter around 
various centres, and thus to isolate them 
from each other ; centrifugal force tends to 
disperse them. Under the laws of the 
forces of matter and motion — established 
by God himself, and acting under His 
guidance — these numberless bodies, of all 
forms and sizes, which fill the space and 
adorn our heavens, combine into those 
worlds and groups of worlds whose won- 



64 CREATION. 

derful organization it is the province of 
astronomy to discover and describe. 

It is premature to say that this noble 
science has as yet furnished us a satis- 
factory history of the generations of the 
starry heavens, and of their real structure. 

But much has been done toward it. 
The grand conception of the structure of 
the heavens, proposed by Herschel, seems 
to adapt itself to the text. Gauging the 
heavens in all directions with his telescope 
he found regions crowded with stars, while 
in other parts they are few and far distant 
from each other. These appearances, says 
Herschel, can be accounted for by conceiv- 
ing that all our visible heavens are but an 
immense cluster of self-luminous stars, of 
which our sun, with its retinue of planets, 
is but one, situated not far from the centre. 
The form of this vast cluster is that of a 
disk, whose outer boundary is the Milky 
Way. In this the stars seem ready to 
break up and assume the shape of the 




SPIRAL NEBULA OF LORD ROSSE 
CIRCULAR NEBULA. 



SECOND COSMOGONIC DAY. 65 

branches of a spiral nebula. Beyond ex- 
tends, in immeasurable distance, the dark 
abyss of space. In this, again, are thou- 
sands of nebulous masses, each of which 
may be a starry heaven like ours. Here 
we may fancy we recognize — in the cluster 
of visible stars, to which our sun, moon, and 
earth itself belong — the waters below the 
heavens, followed by the vast expanse be- 
yond, containing the world of the nebulae 
— the heavens of heavens, and the waters 
above the heavens, of which the Psalmist 
speaks. 

According to Maedler all the heavenly 
bodies revolve around a common centre 
of gravity, situated in the region of the 
Pleiades. 

Alexander, on the contrary, recognized 
in the great spiral nebulae of Lord Eosse, 
whose composing stars are launched by 
centrifugal force into space, in parabolic 
lines, never to return by the same paths 
again, the very process by which the Crea- 



66 CREATION. 

tor dispersed these stars throughout the 
heavens, and thus peopled their empty 
spaces with these luminous bodies. 

But whether we accept the views of 
Herschel, of Maedler, or of Alexander, 
concerning the structure and formation of 
the heavens, one fact admitted by all is 
the work of separation, of individualiza- 
tion, which must have preceded the present 
combination of the heavenly bodies, and is 
indicated as the special work of the second 
cosmogonic day. 

But while that process of separation 
and dispersion is going on, the gradual 
concentration of each special sun leads to 
another kind of individualization of which 
our solar system offers the only example 
accessible to our observation, viz. : the 
formation of dark planets and satellites. 
While in the twin stars revolving round a 
common centre of gravity, we perceive the 
effect produced when the masses are nearly 
equal, in the nebulous stars of all grades 



SECOND COSMOGONIC DAY. 67 

we follow the gradual concentration from 
a gaseous state to a compact and well- 
defined body. In the genesis of our solar 
system, as explained by the genius of La 
Place and submitted by Stephen Alexan- 
der to exhaustive calculations, the result 
of which amounts almost to a demonstra- 
tion of its truth, we see how a family of 
planets has been detached from a vast 
central body which holds them in bondage 
in their orbits by the power of its mass. 

This last history, which immediately 
concerns the earth as one of the daughters 
of our sun, is so important in helping us 
to understand the phases of development 
undergone by our globe, that it may be 
well to give a short outline of the founda- 
tion on which it rests. 

1. It is found that the distances of 
the orbits of the planets from the sun 
follow a nearly regular law, which is, that, 
starting from the orbit of Mercury and 
counting the place of the asteroids as one 



68 CEEA.TION. 

planet, each succeeding orbit is about 
double the distance of the preceding one. 

2. On the whole, the planets nearer 
the sun are smaller than the more distant 
ones. 

3. Their density is increasing with their 
nearness to the sun. 

4. All the planets and their satellites 
revolve around the sun in the same direc- 
tion and nearly in the same plane as the 
equator of the sun itself. 

5. The velocity of their revolution is 
diminishing with their distance from the 
sun. 

6. The rapidity of their rotation on 
their axis, on the contrary, is increasing. 

All these coincidences point to a com- 
mon law which seems to indicate a com- 
munity of origin. 

To explain it La Place had not to go so 
far back as Herschel, to the point where 
matter begins to gather from the immen- 
sity of space around a nucleus forming a 



SECOND COSMOGONIC DAY. 69 

nebulous mass. He assumed, as his start- 
ing-point, the sun as a nebulous star with 
a powerful nucleus, revolving on its axis, 
and whose hot, gaseous atmosphere ex- 
tended beyond the limit of the orbit of 
Neptune. Plunged in the cold abysses of 
heaven, in which it loses incessantly, by 
radiation, a part of its heat, it cools and 
contracts; its centrifugal force increasing 
rapidly at the same time. Under its ac- 
tion, the cool and heavier particles rush 
toward the equatorial parts, where, owing 
to the continual contraction of the main 
body, they are soon left behind in the 
shape of a ring similar to those which we 
observe around Saturn. 

According to the laws of motion, the 
ring continues to move with the same ve- 
locity as the main body from which it is 
detached. But as the ring itself shrinks 
in cooling, its inner surface, receding from 
the sun, begins to move less rapidly, while 
the outside, approaching nearer the sun, 



70 CREATION. 

moves with greater rapidity. The equi- 
librium being thus disturbed, the ring 
tends to break up, and the outside gaining 
upon the inside, the whole is rolled up 
into a single globular mass with a rotary 
motion in the same direction as that of the 
ring itself. The result is a planet revolv- 
ing around the sun and rotating on its 
axis in the same direction as the sun and 
in the plane of its equator. By further 
contraction of the sun, the same process 
is repeated and new planets are formed. 
They decrease in size because the detached 
rings grow less at every step. They in- 
crease in density, because the later planets 
are detached when the density of the sun 
is increased. The larger planets have a 
more rapid rotation because they have 
been contracting during a longer period of 
time. 

If by the further progress of astronomi- 
cal science we find ourselves warranted in 
accepting the grand views of Herschel on 



SECOND COSMOGONIC DAT. 71 

the construction of the heavens, the ex- 
planation of the numerous forms of nebulae 
and nebulous clusters as developed with 
great ingenuity by Stephen Alexander (in 
the Mathematical Journal), and the lucid 
exposition of our planetary and other 
solar systems by La Place, we might say 
with. Moses, " These are the generations of 
the heavens. " 



IX. 

THIRD COSMOGONIC DAT. 

This day contains tioo works, a. The formation of 
the material g]obe. b. The introduction of the vegeta- 
ble kingdom. 

«. Formation of the Earth. 

" Let the waters under the heavens be gathered into one 
place, and let the dry land appear. And God called 
the dry land earth ; and the gathering together of 
the waters called he seas." 

The main idea is condensation of matter 
into the solid globe, its liquid covering 
and gaseous envelope. Here, as usual, 
Moses gives us the final result of the work, 
and not the process by which it was pro- 
duced. For that we must ask Geology. 

The structure of the hard mantle of rock 
which covers the unknown interior of the 
globe, and the nature of its strata, together 




^earing: 



THIRD C0SM0G0NIC DAY. 73 

with their ever-increasing temperature 
downward, will bear witness to the event- 
ful history of the past ages of our earth ; 
astronomy and chemistry will carry us 
still higher up to the very birth of our 
planet. 

The materials of that part of the earth- 
crust accessible to our investigation — from 
the alluvial surface sands and pebbles, 
through the sandstones, conglomerates, 
slates, and limestones, down to the crystal- 
line bottom rocks — show themselves to be 
the debris of pre-existing rocks, rearranged 
at the bottom of the ocean ; or due, as most 
of the limestones, to the secreting power 
of the polyps, protozoans, and most minute 
animals of the sea. 

The temperature of the waters of this 
ocean was no higher than that of our 
tropical seas; for these rocks contain in- 
numerable relics of marine animals similar 
to, though not identical with, those of the 
present day. Lower down, the crystalline 



74 CREATION. 

rocks, mostly stratified — the so-called meta- 
morphic rocks — still bear the mark of an 
aqueous origin, but also indicate a high 
degree of temperature in the waters, which 
explains both their crystalline character 
and the almost entire absence of traces of 
life in these early seas. 

Coming from deeper sources still, but 
filling perpendicular fissures or chimneys, 
as in volcanoes, crystalline masses of por- 
phyry, compact trap, basalt, and volcanic 
substances cross the regular strata up to 
the surface, and by their igneous nature re- 
veal the existence of an internal temper- 
ature sufficient to keep rocks in a melted 
condition. 

With these general facts in view, and 
aided by the light derived from chemistry, 
physics, and astronomy, we may distin- 
guish, in the gradual formation of the 
physical globe, before the introduction of 
life, four periods : 

1. The nebulous. 



THIRD C0SM0G0N1C DAY. 75 

2. The mineral incandescent. 

3. The period of the hot oceans. 

4. The period of the cold oceans. 

Admitting, as we do, the great probabil- 
ity of the genesis of the solar system having 
taken place, as described above, according 
to La Place ; in the first period, the matter 
of the earth was a part of the hot atmos- 
phere of the sun. In the slow process of 
contraction, consequent upon its cooling, 
the sun left it behind in the form of a 
gaseous ring. The ring breaks in several 
places, and is rolled up into a globular 
mass, which, in accordance with the laws 
of motion, rotates upon itself, and revolves 
around its present body nearly in the plane 
of its equator, and with the velocity im- 
parted to it by the sun itself when it left 
it behind. The new globe, born from the 
old matter of the sun, now enters, as a 
gaseous mass, into the first period of its 
separate existence. 

Loss of heat by radiation causes further 



76 CREATION. 

concentration. The molecules, brought 
nearer together and to the proper temper- 
ature for chemical action, now combine. 
A vast, long-continued, and ever-renewed 
conflagration, with an enormous develop- 
ment of heat and electricity, takes place, 
and the result is an incandescent, melted, 
mineral body, surrounded by a vast lu- 
minous atmosphere. The earth is a sun ; 
quite similar, except in its mass, to the 
glowing orb from which the earth now 
receives its light, and which is slowly 
passing through a like period of incan- 
descence. This is the second period of 
its history. 

The cooling continues : a hard crust is 
formed on the surface of the melted body 
of the globe, and, when the temperature 
becomes low enough to admit of the chem- 
ical combination of hydrogen and oxygen 
into water, the ocean — which was before a 
part of the atmosphere in the shape of 
vapor — is deposited on the solid surface of 



THIRD COSMOGONIC DAY. 77 

the globe. The temperature of this first 
ocean must have been very high, owing to 
the immense weight of the atmosphere 
resting upon it. It has been calculated 
that when the deposition began, the tem- 
perature of the first waters could not have 
been less than 600° Fahr. This geological 
phase, though it is one through which a 
cooling globe has passed, has not, thus far, 
received the attention it deserves. 

Let us try to see what this state of 
things implies, for it is important for the 
explanation of the fourth day. 

The oceans were not only very warm, 
but must have been highly acidulated ; for 
all the acids which form a large part of 
the thousands upon thousands of feet of 
rocks deposited since, must have been then 
in the atmosphere in a gaseous form. 

These hot and acid waters, resting upon 
the old mineral crust, must have decom- 
posed it, and a new series of chemical 
combinations have been formed, to which, 



78 CREATION. 

perhaps, we may refer the deposition 
of the lowermost crystalline, Lawrentian 
rocks of Canada and other places, which 
are found at the base of the new terrestrial 
crust — the only one we actually know. 

By these powerful chemical actions the 
earth was transmuted into a vast, galvanic 
pile, emitting constant streams of electric- 
ity, which, reaching the ethereal space at 
the boundary of the thick atmosphere, be- 
came luminous. According to Herschel, 
the photosphere of the sun may be due to 
a similar cause, and if we accept the most 
plausible explanation of the aurora bore- 
alis, it is but the last vestige of that 
electrical condition of our globe. 

During this third period the earth was 
still surrounded by a photosphere of sub- 
dued brilliancy : it was a nebulous star. 

The process of cooling goes on; the 
physical and chemical forces, thus far so 
active, subside and enter into a state of 
quiescence ; the photosphere gradually dis- 



THIRD COSMOGONIC DAY. 79 

appears; the globe becomes an extinct 
body ; the ocean cools down to the mild 
temperature of our tropical seas, and is 
ready for the introduction of living beings. 
The age of matter is over ; the age of life 
is at hand. The fourth period was that 
of the dark, extinct planet and the cool 
oceans. 

This fourth period, and perhaps the 
latter part of the third, are represented in 
the geological strata by the so-called azoic 
rocks, which are found in all continents. 

At the beginning of this stage of the 
formation of the globe we have no reason 
to believe that the three great geographi- 
cal elements were not still in the place 
assigned to each by their density; the 
solid land forming the central mass, a 
uniform ocean a general covering, and the 
atmosphere the last envelope. But some- 
what later we have evidence of the appear- 
ance of the first land above the waters 
of the ocean. Extensive surfaces and low 



80 CREATION. 

mountain chains, both in the Old and 
New World, belong to this age. Geology- 
explains very plausibly the sinking of the 
large surfaces, now containing the oceans, 
and the rising between them of the 
continents and mountains by the gradual 
shrinkage of the cooling interior, forcing 
the hard external crust — which had be- 
come too large — to mould itself on the 
smaller sphere by folding into mighty 
wrinkles. This process could not be 
better described than by the words of 
Moses : " Let the waters be gathered into 
one place, and let the dry land appear " — 
implying that the land was already formed 
under the surface of the ocean, and was 
subsequently raised above it. 

Though, during this physico-chemical his- 
tory of the earth, all the forces of mat- 
ter were at w T ork, it was not with equal 
intensity. The most general — gravita- 
tion — prevailed in the nebulous period ; in 
the second stage, the power of the specific 



THIRD COSMOGONIC DAY. 81 

chemical forces, acting by the dry process, 
was greatest ; in the third, these forces 
acted more quietly by the wet process. 
Later, during the era of life, the mechani- 
cal forces of the waters of the oceans 
— tides and waves — and land waters, to 
which are due the formation of most of 
the strata composing the earth crust, be- 
came altogether prevalent. Thus every 
period owes its sj)ecific character to the 
greater activity of one of the material forces 
at work. 

The first part of this third day closes the 
era of matter. 

In summing up the creative work ac- 
complished during the three cosmogonic 
days, we can easily recognize in this world* 
of matter the same method of successive 
development as was employed by the Crea- 
tor in the world of life. 

Matter, a dark, uniform, inactive, gase- 
ous fluid, is the starting-point. General 
activity with movement and light is the 



82 CEEATION. 

first step ; breaking up into different indi- 
vidual bodies, scattered through the heav- 
ens, is the second; combination in organ- 
ized groups, and concentration into or- 
ganized individuals — as we have been able 
to follow it up in the formation of the 
sun and the earth — is the third, thus pre- 
paring the world of matter for the world 
of life. 

But in this third day there is a second 
work, entirely unlike the first, belonging 
to the age of organic life : the creation of 
the plant. 



X. 

THIRD C0SM0G0NIC DAY CONTINUED. 

b. Vegetation Appeaes. 

" And God said, * Let the earth bring forth vegetation, 
herb bearing seed, fruit tree yielding fruit after its 
kind, whose seed is in it upon the earth ; ' and it 
was so. 

"And the earth brought forth vegetation, herb 
yielding seed after its kind, and tree yielding fruit 
whose seed is in it after its kind ; and God saw that 
it was good. 

" And evening was, and morning was ; day third." 

With the appearance of vegetation the 
history of the earth enters into an entirely- 
new phase. It is the beginning, or the 
heralding of the Era of life. 

When passing from the phenomena of in- 
organic nature, or dead matter, into those 
of organic nature, we find ourselves in an 



84 CREATION. 

entirely new domain, whose laws show no 
similarity to those of the preceding one. 

In organized beings a new, immaterial 
principle, superior to matter, governs the 
material molecules so as to make them 
assume new forms unknown to the mineral. 

The hundred thousand forms of plants 
known to botanists are composed, in the 
main, of but few of the sixty-six chemical 
elements. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and 
some nitrogen are made to combine in a lim- 
ited number of complex compounds, before 
unknown to chemistry, and which constitute 
the chief substance of all vegetation. 

The mode of growth in the two realms 
is totally unlike. 

The most minute incipient crystal has 
the same form, the same plane surfaces 
with sharply denned angles, as the largest 
crystal of the same kind, and grows with- 
out definite limitation by the outward ad- 
dition of similar figures, all parts being 
alike. The crystal is a fixed form. It 



THIRD C0SM0G0NIC DAY CONTINUED. 85 

does not die, like the plant, by an inward 
process, but continues to exist until it is 
destroyed by external causes. 

The fundamental organ of both plants 
and animals is a flexible, globular mole- 
cule — the cell — already containing fluid in 
motion, and growing by inward division. 

The plant is developed from a germ 
or living seed, growing downward in the 
root, and upward through successive stages 
in the stem, the leaf, the flower, and ter- 
minates the cycle of its individual life by 
the formation of a new seed, destined to 
reproduce its like. An ever-circulating 
fluid, the sap, is bringing food to all its 
parts. 

In the plant, as in every organized being, 
there is an inward principle, of individual- 
ity, involved in the seed — a soul — not pos- 
sessed by the crystal, with a variety of 
organs and functions working toward a 
common aim, for the benefit of the individ- 
ual. An inward growth with a beginning 



86 CREATION. 

and a definite end, and a power of repro- 
duction which perpetuates the species ; phe- 
nomena which are all absolutely foreign to 
inorganic matter. 

Should that principle of life be removed 
movement ceases, the growth is stopped, 
the inorganic molecules recover their free- 
dom and return to their allegiance, while 
the organic body decomposes, loses its 
form, and is destroyed. And still the 
chemist finds in its debris the identical 
weight and materials which were employed 
in its living body; none of the material 
molecules are lost; but the controlling 
power which gave them the shape of the 
plant is gone. 

We have therefore to recognize here 
the introduction of a new principle. If it 
is not indicated in the text by bard, it is 
because it is but the peristyle of the 
temple of true life, the sentient life and 
the condition of its existence. 

The characteristics of the plant kingdom 



THIRD COSMOGONIC DAY CONTINUED. 87 

are admirably summed up in the words, 
" And God said, Let the earth bring forth 
vegetation, the herb yielding seed, and the 
fruit-tree yielding fruit after its hind, 
whose seed is in itself V 

The words " Let the earth bring forth," 
may seem to favor the idea of a combina- 
tion of elements without the introduction 
of a new principle. But the same phrase 
is used in verse 20, when a true creation 
{bard) — that of the first animals — was 
meant and took place. And again, in 
Genesis ii., 4th and 5th, we find "in the 
day the Lord God made every plant of the 
field before it vias in the earth, and every 
herb of the field before it grew." This 
declaration distinguishes the plant life as 
a principle distinct from the matter which 
it moulds into the new form necessary for 
its new functions. 

This view must be held as the most ra- 
tional ; for all experiments — even the very 
latest and apparently most successful — 



88 CKEATIOTST. 

made during the last hundred years, up to 
the present time, to prove the so-called 
spontaneous generation of organized beings 
from dead matter, have failed to convince 
the majority of thinking men of its reality. 
Taking into consideration the present state 
of our knowledge, we are obliged to admit 
that matter, unaided, can never rise above 
its own level ; nor, unless associated with 
a new power, can it ever engender life. 

The most important function of the 
plant in the economy of nature is, with the 
aid of the sun's light, to turn inorganic in- 
to organic matter, and thus prepare food 
for the animal. Nothing else in nature 
does this important work. The animal 
cannot do it, and starves in the midst of 
an abundance of the materials needed for 
the building up of its body. The plant 
stores up force which it is not called upon 
to use ; the animal takes it ready made as 
food, and expends it in activity. The 
plant, therefore, is the indispensable ba- 



THIRD COSMOGONIC DAY CONTINUED. 89 

sis of all animal life ; for though animals 
partially feed upon each other, ultimately 
the organic matter they need must come 
from the plant. 

The manner in which Moses introduces 
the creation of the plant, as a work dis- 
tinct in its nature from the first work of 
the third day, and the position he assigns 
to it, within and at the end of that day, 
and before the creation of living beings, 
are highly philosophical. This order is 
required by the law of progress, accord- 
ing to which the inferior appears . before 
the superior, because the first is the con- 
dition of the phenomenal existence of the 
latter. 

Is this position of the plant in the order 
of creation confirmed by geology ? If we 
should understand the text as meaning 
that the whole plant kingdom, from the 
lowest infusorial form to the highest di- 
cotyledon, was created at this early day, 
geology would assuredly disprove it. But 



90 CREATION. 

the author of Genesis, as we have before 
remarked, mentions every order of facts but 
once, and he does it at the time of its first 
introduction. Here, therefore, the whole 
system of plants is described in full outline, 
as it has been developed, from the lowest 
to the most perfect, in the succession of 
ages ; for it will never again be spoken of 
in the remainder of the narrative. 

What plants actually existed at this pe- 
riod geology must find out. The possi- 
bility of infusorial plants living in warm, 
and even in hot water, is proved by their 
being found in the geysers of Iceland, and 
in hot, acidulated springs. The latest geo- 
logical investigations tell us that abun- 
dant traces of carbonaceous matter and 
old silicious deposits, among the so-called 
azoic rocks, indicate the presence of a large 
number of infusorial protophytes in those 
early seas. Whether they furnished food 
for the primitive protozoans of a similar 
grade is still a matter of doubt ; but the 



THIRD COSMOGONIC DAY CONTINUED. 91 

limestone strata in the azoic age seem to 
speak in the affirmative. 

The striking fact that Moses, though 
fully recognizing the great difference be- 
tween the two works of the third day, and 
the importance of the vegetable kingdom, 
did not assign to it a special day, but left 
it in the age of matter, is not less full of 
meaning. 

The plant is not yet life, but the bridge 
between matter and life — the link between 
the two ages. Placed within the material 
age of creation, it is the harbinger and 
promise of a more noble and better time 
to come. It is the root of the living tree 
planted in the inorganic globe, and des- 
tined to nourish in the age of life. 



XL 

FOUKTH COSMOGONIC DAY. 

The fourth day opens the era of life, with the appear- 
ance of the sun, moon, and stars in the heavens visible 
from the earth ; a work which apparently still belongs 
to the physical order, but whose object is to benefit life. 

Solas Light. 

" Let luminaries be in the expanse of the Heavens, to 
give light upon the earth ; and to separate the day 
from the night ; and for seasons, and for days, and 
for years." 

If the genesis of the solar system as ex- 
plained by Laplace is true, as we believe it 
is, the sun and moon were not then created, 
but they existed before, and now enter into 
new relations with the earth. During the 
age of matter, the intensity of chemical 
action was a source of permanent light — 
the earth was self-luminous, the light of 



FOURTH COSMOGONIC DAY. 93 

the sun, moon, and stars being merged in 
the stronger light of its photosphere, and 
therefore invisible to it. But after the dis- 
appearance of its luminous envelope, our 
glorious heavens, with sun, moon, and 
stars become visible, and the earth depends 
upon this outside source for light and heat. 
Its spherical form causes the unequal dis- 
tribution of both, which establishes the 
differences of climate from the pole to the 
equator- Its rotation gives, for the first 
time, a succession of day and night, which 
breaks the permanent light of the preceding 
ages. Its revolution round the sun brings, 
in their turn, the seasons- and the years, 
Thus are prepared the physical conditions 
necessary to the existence of living beings, 
the periods of activity and rest, of summer 
and winter, and that variety of tempera- 
ture and moisture which fosters the almost 
infinite richness of the organic forms of 
plants and animals displayed in our world 
of life. 



94 CREATION. 

In the third day the earth. was ready 
for life ; in the fourth, the heavens are 
ready to help in the work. The fourth day 
is, as it were, a reminiscence of the inor- 
ganic period, and forms another connection 
between the two principal stages of the 
odobe. 




o 



CO 



XII. 

FIFTH COSMOGONIC DAY. 

Creation of the Lower Animals in the Water and Air. 

" And God said, Let the waters teem with creeping crea- 
tures, (swarm with swarmers,) living beings, and let 
birds fly over the earth across the face of the ex- 
panse of the heavens. 

1 'And God created the great stretched out sea mon- 
sters and all living creatures that creep, which the 
waters breed abundantly after their kind, and every 
winged bird after its kind, and God saw that it was 
good. 

" And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and 
multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let the 
birds multiply on the earth. And evening was, and 
morning was, day fifth." 

The fifth and sixth days offer no difficul- 
ties, for they unfold the successive crea- 
tion of the various tribes of animals which 
people the water, the air, and the land, in 
the precise order indicated by geology. 

This history is introduced by the sol- 
emn word bard, which occurs here for the 






96 CREATION. 

second time, and gives ns to understand 
that, with the creation of the animal, an- 
other great and entirely new order of ex- 
istence begins. 

All that we said on the occasion of the 
introduction of vegetation, as the lower 
realm of organized nature, applies with 
double force to the animal. The plant, 
indeed, as we have remarked, was but 
a preparation for the appearance of the 
living organized being. The variety of 
animal forms is many times greater. The 
principle of iadividuality becomes more 
intense in the animal, the variety of or- 
gans and of organic functions is greatly 
increased. 

Matter is in the animal, but controlled 
and shaped into new forms foreign to its 
own nature, to suit the wants of the im- 
material being within. Vegetative life is 
in it, but subservient to higher functions, 
which the plant could never perform by 
itself. A conscious perception of the 



FIFTH COSMOGONIC DAY. 97 

outer world by sensation, however, and a 
will to react upon it, are powers which 
place the animal on a higher platform, 
and make it a being which, by its na- 
ture and its functions, is entirely distinct 
from the lower grades of existence. 

Here the important question which we 
have already asked, again recurs : Do all 
these phenomena of life, so different from 
the simple work of the inorganic par- 
ticles of matter, take place without the 
help of a new power, of an immaterial 
nature, for which matter is but an in- 
strument for performing these higher func- 
tions; or are they merely the result of 
a new combination of the chemical ele- 
ments, left to themselves ? In other 
words : Can life proceed from non-living 
matter; or is it true that life can be 
evolved only from the living? All the 
more recent, careful experiments have de- 
monstrated that the first is but an illusion ; 
life alone begets life ; and such reliable 



s 



98 CREATION. 

observers as Pasteur, Tyndall, and others, 
have declared the spontaneous generation 
an untenable hypothesis. Even the most 
pronounced materialists, such as Haeckel, 
avow that science has not yet been able 
to evolve life out of dead matter ; but, as 
the latter savant naively expresses himself, 
"it must be so, for otherwise we should 
have to admit a miracle," which for him 
is an absurdity. And still this miracle 
did occur, for the introduction of a new 
element is a creation — that is, a miracle 
i — and so the Bible says. 

Let us cast a glance at the geological 
history of the life system, such as present 
science enables us to read it, and the ad- 
mirable correctness of the Mosaic account 
will be evident. 

GEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF LIFE. 

Geology informs us that the terrestrial 
crust, down to its lowest attainable depths, 
is composed of layers placed upon each 



FIFTH C0SM0G0NIC DAY. 99 

other, different in rnineralogical character 
and structure, and evidently deposited at 
the bottom of the ocean. The order 
of their superposition furnishes a sure 
chronological table of the events which 
took place during their formation; the 
lowermost stratum, the first deposited, be- 
ing the oldest ; the surface layers, the last 
formed, being the most recent. 

These strata preserve in their folds the 
archives of the creation of organized be- 
ings, living at the time of their deposition, 
whose innumerable remains fill their rocky 
shelves and reveal to the geologist the 
order of appearance of the various tribes 
of plants and animals, thus enabling him 
to reconstruct the history of the life sys- 
tem, through all its gradual changes, from 
its earliest beginning to the present time. 

Five great ages of life may be distin- 
guished, each of them characterized by 
the predominance of a certain class of 
animals, and marking the great steps of 



100 CREATION. 

gradual progress in the vast system of 
the living forms of the past. 

These are preceded, as a preface, by an 
age of protophytes and protozoans, as yet 
rather vaguely determined, in the so-called 
azoic or archsean rocks. 

1. The age of mverteb rated animals, con- 
tained in the Silurian series of rocks. 

2. The age of fishes, in the Devonian 
series. 

3. The age of the first land plants, in 
the Carboniferous rocks. 

4. The age of the reptiles, in the Me- 
sozoic rocks — triassic, Jurassic, and creta- 
ceous. 

5. The age of the mammals, in the Ter- 
tiary rocks, which is closed by the age of 
man, in the Quaternary or present age. 

The Age of Protophytes and Protozoans. 

The lowermost strata to which we have 
access are the so-called Laurentian of Can- 
ada, and analogous formations in other 



FIFTH COSMOGONIC DAY. 101 

continents. These rocks of great thickness 
show absolutely no traces of life and can 
really be considered as the end of the 
azoic age of the globe. But just above 
them the middle Laurentians contain 
carbon, in the shape of graphite, and 
masses of limestone, both of which indi- 
cate the first signs of vegetable and ani- 
mal life. It is well known that carbon, 
when found chemically isolated, denotes 
a vegetable process. A vast quantity of 
graphite and carbonaceous matter, found 
disseminated in the most ancient layers, 
up to the Cambrian, seems to prove the 
presence in the waters of a great number 
of protophytes whose delicate forms could 
not be preserved, while the solid sub- 
stance — the carbon — testifies to their 
former existence. 

The intercalated limestones, carefully ex- 
amined under the microscope by Dr. Daw- 
son, appeared to him to be fossil species of 
monstrous protozoans, though other skil- 



102 CREATION. 

f ul investigators have since refused to rec- 
ognize an animal in the Eozoon Canadense. 
It must be confessed that this would be a 
natural beginning of the life system, all the 
more that the limestone deposits are, to a 
great extent, in later ages, the result of the 
life operations of most minute beings. 

The Cambrian and Silurian Age — Pri- 
mordial Fauna. 

If there is still some doubt as to the ex- 
istence of life at this early stage, there is 
none in regard to it at the beginning of the 
Cambrian and the Silurian a^e. Here 
we find ourselves at once in the presence, 
not of doubtful animal forms, but of a 
complete fauna, representing the three 
great archetypes of invertebrated animals, 
the radiates, mollusks, and the articu- 
lates, with all their various subdivisions. 
They do not appear successively, as might 
be expected, in the order of their perfec- 
tion, but all simultaneously, on the same 



Plate V. 




Pterichthys Cornutus. 




Cephalaspis Lyell 




Dipterus. 
DEVONIAN AGE — FISHES 



FIFTH COSMOGONIC DAY. 103 

level, the mollusks preserving a decided 
pre-eminence. 

During untold ages, represented by suc- 
cessive deposits of rocks, amounting to 
over twenty thousand feet in thickness, 
corals and plant-like radiates, mollusks of 
all grades — some of gigantic size — num- 
berless crustaceans of embryonic forms, 
swarm in the tepid waters of the ocean ; 
but no fishes are found, save a few at the 
very end of this long period, as fore- 
runners of the higher forms which are 
coming. This is the reign of the lower 
animal life — the involuntary or instinct life 
— typified by the invertebrates. 

Devonian Age. 

The Devonian strata contain an abun- 
dance of remains of the fish tribe, which 
is added to the riches of the sea, and 
takes the lead among the tenants of the 
ocean ; for, though the lowest grade in the 
archetype of vertebrates, it belongs to the 



104 CREATION. 

higher level of animal life, with brain, in 
which the sensation and will predominate. 
The strange forms of these first fishes, 
their reptilian character, their powerful 
organization, make them the scavengers 
and the kings of the seas. This is the 
reign of fishes. 

These two long ages, the Silurian and 
the Devonian, were the aquatic age of the 
world. The whole life system was confined 
to the waters of the ocean. The tempera- 
ture of these waters and the physical cir- 
cumstances which characterized them must 
have been similar in all continents, for the 
Silurian and Devonian animals show a 
remarkable resemblance of species in the 
most widely separated regions of the globe. 
Though the specific forms are numerous, 
they are not so deeply marked. 

The same aquatic character is also ob- 
served in the vegetation. The few plants 
which have resisted the decomposition are 
those which live only in the water, and 



FIFTH COSMOGONTC DAY. 105 

nearly all belong, like the algae, to the 
flowerless thallogens, whose tissues are 
composed exclusively of vegetable cells. 
In the Devonian, plants of a higher grade, 
belonging to the vascular cryptogams, 
such as the ferns, are added, and already 
proclaim the presence of land. But the 
triumphal development of vegetation takes 
place in the following — the Carboniferous 
— age, in which the superabundance of 
plant life becomes the chief characteristic. 

Carboniferous Age. 

During the Devonian age, the great pre- 
dominance of the sandstone formations 
indicated the shallowness of the seas in 
which these materials of the decomposing 
rocks, tossed about by the waves, were de- 
posited. 

In the Carboniferous age the continents, 
which were slowly growing under the 
water, reach the surface. These vast ex- 
panses of newly emerged, still swampy, 



106 CREATION. 

lands cover themselves with a mantle of 
verdure. In the warm and moist atmos- 
phere, overcharged with carbonic acid gas, 
humble cryptogams attain to the size of 
stately forest trees, and luxuriant ferns and 
kindred plants provide the material for the 
vast beds of coal so precious to civilized 
man. This is also an as;e of slow oscilla- 
tions of the land. The swamp, in which 
w x ere decomposed the plants which form 
a bed of coal, was slowly submerged and 
the growth of the forest stopped. New 
deposits of mud and sand covered that 
mass of vegetation, under which it w&s 
transformed into coal. A subsequent 
movement raised the land again above 
the water, the vegetative process begins 
anew and provides materials for another 
forest and another bed of coal. This pro- 
cess is repeated so often that we find a se- 
ries of over forty similar superposed beds 
of coal, in the United States ; sixty, in 
Nova Scotia, and nearly one hundred, in 



FIFTH COSMOGONIC DAY. 107 

England. When we reflect that it has 
been calculated that a luxuriant forest, 
like that of the valley of the Amazon, 
put under water, would produce only half 
an inch of coal, we can form an idea of 
the length of a geological period, imply- 
ing the successive growth and transfor- 
mation into coal of hundreds of forests, 
adorning the ground one after another, 
and leaving behind them beds of coal of 
four, eight, and twenty feet in thickness. 

The Carboniferous age was pre-eminent- 
ly an age of verdure. Though similar coal 
beds are found in every age, geology fails 
to record, before or after this remarkable 
period, a time at which these deposits are 
at once so extensive, so universal, and 
quantitatively so abundant. 

But in that immense mass of vegetation, 
none of the present flowers, with vivid 
colors, enlivened the landscape. Seven- 
eighths of the species represented were 
ferns, either in the form of luxuriant foli- 



108 CREATION. 

age or in the shape of trees. The other 
trees, like the stately lepidodendron, are 
gigantic forms of the puny ground pine of 
the present day. The stout sigillarias with 
their enormous roots, the slender calamites, 
resembling the cane-brakes, were the princi- 
pal ornaments of these dark, moist forests. 
All these belong, like the ferns, to the great 
vascular cryptogams, or intermediate forms. 
The only flowering trees were a small num- 
ber of gymnosperms, or of the pine tribe, 
whose inconspicuous flowers do not modify 
the character of the forests but which her- 
ald a higher type of vegetation to come. 

We see here, therefore, the first grand 
display of a land vegetation, the form of 
which, however, is limited to the class of 
plants whose botanical character is the 
predominance of foliage over every other 
part of the plant. 

This age of verdure extended over the 
whole world ; for we find it with similar 
characteristics, nay, similar specific form, 



FIFTH COSMOGONIC DAY. 109 

in all the continents, though there is no- 
where so great a development as in North 
America. Coal is found with the same 
species of plants from the Arctic regions, 
in Spitzberg, through the temperate and 
tropical zones, to South America, Africa, 
and Australia. Every one is aware of the 
vast importance of these enormous de- 
posits of coal for human industry, upon 
which depends so much of the riches of all 
civilized nations. 

But the coal era performed also an im- 
portant function in favor of the life sys- 
tem, in purifying the atmosphere of its 
excess of carbonic acid gas. By the de- 
composition of that gas by the living 
plants, under the action of the sun, the 
carbon was fixed in the coal beds, while 
the oxygen was returned to the atmos- 
phere, for the furtherance of animal life. 
The beneficial influence of this process is 
shown by the fact that the first air-breath- 
ing animals, such as insects and amphib- 



110 CREATION. 

ians, begin to appear only in and toward 
the end of that period. 

The progress of the life system in the 
Carboniferous age is not so well marked. 
A few small amphibious reptiles, and to- 
ward the end large types, of a mixed 
character already announce that the great 
reptilian age is at hand. 

The three preceding ages together make 
the Palaeozoic Era, or the ancient history 
of the life system ; for it can be fitly called 
the time of the three great beginnings : 

1. The vegetative life of the inverte- 
brates in the Silurian. 

2. The higher life of the brain animals 
as represented by the fishes. 

3. The Carboniferous, with the first dis- 
play of land life. 

Now opens 

The Mesozoic Age. 

In the Triassic, of this age, the sand- 
stone formation, indicating a considerable 



FIFTH COSMOGONIC DAY. Ill 

destruction and reconstruction, with a 
meagre supply of fossils, predominates. 

In the Jurassic and Cretaceous, the great 
abundance of limestone formations de 
notes a prevalence of lower marine life 
the very rocks are formed by an accumu 
lation of microscopic protozoans. The de 
velopment of the invertebrates, and par 
ticularly of the mollusks, attains here its 
highest pitch, in the number and beauty 
of its most perfect form, the cephalo- 
pods. Ammonites, remarkable for their 
great size and their elaborate elegance 
and variety, and innumerable Belemnites, 
fill the Jurassic and the Cretaceous seas 
with a profusion of molluscan life which 
is never found again,, to that degree, in 
later periods. 

This is again the time of the formation 
and growth of coral reefs and coral isl- 
ands, which were so well defined, that the 
geologists of the Jura gave a full account 
of their structure, before Dana and Dar- 



112 CEEATION. 

win described the same phenomena as ob- 
served by them, among the thousand isl- 
ands which stud the Pacific. 

But by far the most important feature 
of this age, is the preponderance and va- 
riety of reptilian life. 

Gigantic amphibians, in the first period, 
present a curious mixture of the charac- 
ters of that class intermingled with those 
of the true reptiles. 

The Jurassic seas were peopled with the 
long-necked Plesiosaurs and the stoutbuilt 
Ichthyosaurs, from twenty to thirty feet 
long. 

In the great central sea, which was then 
covering the plains of Kansas, swam a va- 
riety of reptiles, some of which, of ser- 
pentine forms, like the Elasmosaurus and 
the Edestosaurus, attained the size of sixty 
to eighty feet and more ; while the Atlantic 
coast was tenanted by numerous species of 
massive Mosasaurs. 

Land reptiles were equally abundant 



FIFTH COSMOGONIC DAY. 113 

and notable in size. Besides the crocodile 
and the lizard-like Iguanodon, the Meg- 
alosaur and many others, the family of 
the Dinosaurs deserves a special mention. 
Their bird-like affinities of structure, the 
disproportion of their anterior legs to their 
hind limbs, whose length and strength al- 
lowed them to take an upright position 
which gave them a kangaroo-like appear- 
ance, make them one of the most remark- 
able families of this age of reptiles. 

This family contained also the largest 
types of land animals that have ever ex- 
isted. The Hadrosaurus of New Jersey 
stood erect, from twenty to twenty-five 
feet high. The Atlantosaurus of Colo- 
rado reached the height of from sixty to 
eighty feet, so that it would be difficult 
to understand how the strength of its 
muscles could have supported the weight 
of its bones, if it was not that the latter 
had been found hollow, like those of the 
birds. 



114 CREATION. 

The atmosphere also was replete with 
reptilian life.. There were bat-like ani- 
mals with enormous heads and membran- 
ous wings — the Pterodactyls — of all di- 
mensions, from our ordinary bats to mon- 
strous species whose expanded wings 
measured twenty-five feet from tip to tip. 
Contemporaneously with them, a wonder- 
ful family of birds, with teeth and rep- 
tilian characters, prepared the transition 
to the true birds, which made their appear- 
ance, in small numbers, at a later time. 

A last feature of the Mesozoic age must 
be noted. The forest trees of the Triassic 
and Jurassic periods were essentially made 
up of Calamites, colossal Horsetails, and a 
majority of Gymnosperms ; that is Pines, 
Cycads, and other Conifers. 

With the Cretaceous period, the char- 
acter of the vegetation changes. The 
classes of the Monocotyledons and the Di- 
cotyledons show themselves in profusion. 
The oak, the maple, the sassafras, etc., 



FIFTH COSMOGONIC DAY. 115 

which constitute the bulk of our pres- 
ent forests, are found in abundance in the 
temperate regions, and palm trees in the 
warmer latitudes. The scenery assumes 
altogether the modern aspect which it 
still retains. 

No two ages in the history of the life 
system present a more striking contrast 
than this age of the mastery of reptiles, 
and the Neozoic, or Tertiary, which fol- 
lows. These huge reptiles, which filled 
the water, the land, and the atmosphere, 
suddenly disappear after the Cretaceous. 
"While the vegetation of the landscape re- 
mains very much the same, a new class 
of animals, the mammals, the typical and 
the highest of the vertebrates, at once 
take their place on the globe. During the 
three periods which succeed each other 
in that age — the Eocene, the Miocene, and 
the Pliocene — the various types are gradu- 
ally developed ; in the Eocene, mostly 
mixed types, which are afterwards special- 



116 CREATION. 

ized; in the Miocene, the great pachy- 
derms, the Mammoth and the closely allied 
Mastodon, the group of the Herbivores, 
and Frugivores, including the monkeys; 
in the Pliocene, are added a large number 
of Carnivorous animals, which become 
characteristic of this period. 

Last of all man appears, uniting in him- 
self all the perfections of the animal king- 
dom, and with him a higher plane of life, 
which begins the moral world. 

These facts speak a strong language. 
They tell us that creation is a reality. 
Besides the primordial creation of matter, 
that few will deny, the creation of life 
must be acknowledged, since, as we have 
seen, science has thus far been unable 
to derive it from dead matter by any pro- 
cess whatever. Scientific inquiries are far 
from having demonstrated that all the ar- 
chetypes of the invertebrates which ap- 
pear simultaneously in the Silurian, are 
derived from one another. Science fails to 



FIFTH COSMOGONIC DAY. 117 

discover traces of a direct descent of the 
vertebrate from the invertebrate, whose 
plan of structure is entirely unlike ; of 
the large fishes of the Devonian from 
any preceding animal form ; of the huge 
reptiles of the middle ages of life from 
the fishes of the Devonian. It cannot be 
proved that the great pachyderms, which 
suddenly come upon the stage in the ter- 
tiary epoch, are the offspring of the rep- 
tiles of the preceding age. The bond 
which unites them is of an immaterial 
nature ; the marvellous unity of plan 
which we observe is in the mind of the 
Creator. We should then acknowledge a 
plan, admirable in conception, perfect in 
execution. There is a wisdom which de- 
vises, a free will, and a power which exe- 
cutes and creates in succession, at the ap- 
pointed time, when it is fitting, and not a 
single great unconscious whole developing 
by itself. 

To say more for the present is to go be- 



118 CREATION. 

vond the facts as we know them. Whether 
*/ 

the further progress of embryology will 
force us to modify these views remains for 
the future to say. 

In the order of time there is progress. 
The inferior being always precedes the su- 
perior; the imperfect the perfect. Inor- 
ganic nature precedes organization. The 
watery element reigns before the terres- 
trial ; the aquatic and inferior animals be- 
fore the terrestrial and superior. In the 
series of the vertebrated animals, we see 
fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammifers ap- 
pearing in the ages of the globe in the 
order of their perfection. 

Whether or not we view this order as the 
result of evolution, God's guiding hand 
must be discerned, without which nature 
alone could not have produced it. 

The accordance of these facts of geol- 
ogy with the Mosaic account is so evident 
that no further explanation is necessary. 

It is, perhaps, here the place to note 



FIFTH COSMOGONIC DAY. 119 

the wonderful accuracy with which Moses 
gives, in a few words, the characteristics 
of the groups of animals which he men- 
tions. It would be difficult better to de- 
signate than as " swarmers, living beings," 
the prodigious quantity of small medusae 
and marine animal culse which are every 
day produced and swallowed by the mil- 
lions, as the food of the monstrous whales. 
And again, no name could be better applied 
to the great reptiles of the Mesozoic age 
that he describes, than the word tanni- 
nim, or great stretched out sea monsters, 
by which they are indicated in the text. 

In the Tertiary the herbivorous animals, 
domesticated by man, are named cattle ; 
while the others, including the carnivo- 
rous, are called the wild beasts, and the 
smaller ones, the creeping things. 



XIII. 

SIXTH COSMOGONIC DAT. 

The sixth day, which is the third of the era of life, 
contains two works, as did the third day of the era of 
matter : a. The creation of the higher animals, espe- 
cially those living on the dry land, corresponding with 
the Tertiary age. b. The creation of man in the Qua- 
ternary age. 

a. Higher Animals. Mammalia. 

" And God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, 
and the cattle after their kind, and every creeping 
thing of the ground after its kind, and God saw 
that it was good." 

Foe this creation the word made is used 
instead of create, for it is not the first in- 
troduction, but the continuation of the life 
system. 

The creeping animals of the sixth day 
are not reptiles, but, according to Gesen- 



SIXTH COSMOGONIC DAT. 121 

ius the smaller mammalia — rats, mice, 
etc. 

The greatest changes in the mineral 
and organic creation, according to geol- 
ogy, took place between the cretaceous and 
tertiary epochs. And there, also, Moses 
places the beginning of a new day. For 
not only are the land animals a new set of 
beings, they are also the highest, and the 
family to which man belongs as a member 
of the life system of nature. 



XIV. 

SIXTH C0SM0G0NIC DAY CONTINUED. 

b. Creation of Man. 

" And God created man in his image, in the image of 
God created he him, male and female created he 
them." 

The second work of the sixth day is of a 
vastly different nature from the first. 

The animal kingdom, as such and in 
itself, is finished; but between this plane 
and the new sphere which is coming a link 
is necessary, and this link to a more ex- 
alted grade of life is man. 

The creation of man is a fact of such 
great importance that it could not be men- 
tioned otherwise than separately. Here 
again, and for the third time, the word bard 
announces, not a simple continuation of 
the animal, but the creation of still another 



SIXTH COSMOGONIC DAY CONTINUED. 123 

order of existence, the most exalted of all. 
Three times, as if to emphasize the event, 
the potent word is repeated. 

Man, made by the Creator in his own 
image, and upon whose creation Moses puts 
so much stress, to enforce, as it were, the 
idea of his dignity, could not be con- 
founded with the animals. With his ad- 
vent a still higher plane is introduced 
which comprises not only animal but 
spiritual life, which has its own laws, its 
own character, and for which the body is 
but an instrument — an instrument that in 
its service is called upon to perform much 
higher functions than the simple physio- 
logical ones. 

That spiritual element, which constitutes 
man as a distinct creation, can no more be 
derived from the physiological functions 
of the animal than life can be evolved 
from dead matter. There is between the 
two planes an impassable abyss. The in- 
visible world, the world of ideas, which 



124 CREATION. 

contains the roots of all existence, is ab- 
solutely shut up from the animal, for he 
has no power to perceive it. All his 
knowledge comes to him through his bodily 
senses, which are confined to the use of 
his bodily wants, and, directed and limited 
by instinct, do not extend in any way to 
the region of the unseen. The animal, 
therefore, incapable of knowing God, is 
not a responsible moral agent. He is still 
under the law of nature, that is of in- 
stinct or necessity, while man, possessed 
of a knowledge of God, is under the law 
of liberty and thus becomes a responsible, 
or in other words, a moral being. 

We often hear of palaeontologists look- 
ing sedulously for the missing link between 
man and the animal. They forget that in 
the sense of which they speak, there can 
be no link wanting. The figure and the 
structure of the ape is as near as need 
be, to be called a link between man and 
the animal ; the difference between the 



SIXTH COSMOGONIC DAY CONTINUED. 125 

two beiDgs is not in the shape of a 
thumb or of any particular bodily organ, 
but in the moral nature. An animal, as 
beautiful in form as Apollo Belvidere, but 
not possessed of the sense of the invisible, 
would still be an animal and nothing 
more. A poor misshapen Hottentot, en- 
dowed with these spiritual faculties, ren- 
dering him capable of becoming a living 
member of the spiritual world, through 
faith in Christ, would still be a man, be- 
longing to that upper plane of life, and 
bound to his Maker by ties of love and 
adoration. 

The invisible world of ideas is the true 
domain of man, the scene of his activity. 
For this reason, language has been vouch- 
safed to him, while it is denied to the 
animal, whose functions are limited to the 
procuring of food, to self-defense and to 
reproduction. Even the powers of the 
monkey are thus restricted. Hence the 
unlimited capacity for progress in man, 



126 CKEATION. 

and the completely stationary condition in 
the monkey tribe and in all animals, are 
easily explained. Nature has separated the 
two orders by immutable laws. 

Any length of time that Darwin might 
desire for his transformations, would never 
suffice to make of the monkey a civilizable 
man. 

The new element, therefore, which is 
infused into man, at his creation, is the 
religious element, or the capacity of being 
associated, in God's service, with God's 
]ife and God's perfections. 

But why does Moses place this creation, 
not in a separate day, but with the mam- 
malia in the sixth day ? 

Man is the crowning act of the Creator. 
He is the summary of all the perfections 
scattered through the animal kingdom, of 
which he is the head. He is the end 
and aim of the whole development of our 
planet, and as such belongs to our physical 
earth. 



SIXTH COSMOGONIC DAT CONTINUED. 127 

But he is also a being of a new and 
superior order, and therefore must be kept 
distinct. The appearance of the physical 
man is the prophecy and the promise of 
a future and more perfect age of develop- 
ment which begins with him — the age of 
moral freedom and responsibility — that of 
the historical world. 

This second work of the sixth day is 
thus the link between the age of the phy- 
sical creation and that of the moral de- 
velopment of mankind, as the plant was 
the link between the material world and 
that of life. It is the moral world 
planted in the material world, in order to 
make the latter subservient to a higher 
and better aim. 

Before we leave this grand history of 
the creation let us offer a few remarks on 
the relation that it holds to evolution, the 
favorite doctrine of the day. 

Though the narrative is, on the whole, 
singularly non-committal, in regard to any 



128 CREATION. 

specific scientific doctrine, there are a few- 
points on which it is positive. It teaches 
that : 

1. The primordial creation of matter, the 
creation of the system of life, and the crea- 
tion of man, are three distinct creations. 

2. They are not simultaneous but suc- 
cessive. 

3. God's action in the creation is constant. 
As w r e have already observed, each of 

these great orders of things is introduced 
by the word bard, so that Moses seemed to 
distinguish the three great groups of phe- 
nomena as distinct in essence. According 
to this, the evolution from one of these 
orders into the other — from matter into 
life, from animal life into the spiritual life 
of man — is impossible. 

The question of evolution within each of 
these great systems — of matter into vari- 
ous forms of matter, of life into the va- 
rious forms of life, and of mankind into 
all its varieties — remains still open. 



SIXTH COSMOGONIC DAY CONTINUED. 129 

The relation of these three worlds is no 
less remarkable. Matter — the lowest or- 
der — is a general substratum for all the 
others. Aided and fashioned by the prin- 
ciple of life it performs higher functions 
in the plant and animal. Matter, plant 
life, and animal life perform higher intel- 
lectual and moral functions, under the 
guidance of the human soul. 

Every one of the lower powers, associ- 
ated with a higher element, becomes in- 
strumental ; the higher as a cause, the 
lower as a condition of existence, or as an 
instrument, both co-operating to a com- 
mon progress. 

But after each of these factors has per- 
formed its part, something yet remains to 
be explained. The result, varied as it 
may be, is never arbitrary confusion, but 
order and beauty ; and this shows the 
constant and indispensable supervision of 
God over his work. 

9 



130 CREATION. 

Here end the working days of the Cre- 
ator. All his other works God had de- 
clared to be good ; but on the sixth day 
u God saw every thing that he had made, 
and, behold, it was very good." 

The work of the whole week is now 
finished, and perfect as God will have it 
for his purpose — his own glory and the 
education of man. 



XV. 

THE SEVENTH DAY. THE SABBATH OF CREATION. 

" Thus the heavens were finished, and the earth, and all 
the host of them. 

And on the seventh day God ended his work 
which he had made and rested on the seventh day 
from all the work which he had made. 

And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed 
it, for in it he rested from all his w T ork which God 
had created and made." 

Now begins the seventh day, the day of 
rest, or the Sabbath of the earth, when the 
globe and its inhabitants are completed. 

Since the beginning of this day no new 
creation has taken place. God rests as 
the Creator of the visible universe. The 
forces of nature are in that admirable 
equilibrium which we now behold, and 
which is necessary to our existence. No 
more mountains or continents are formed, 



132 CEEATION. 

no new species of plants or animals are 
created. Nature goes on steadily in its 
wonted path. All movement, all progress 
has passed into the realm of mankind, 
which is now accomplishing its task. 

The seventh day is, then, the present age 
of our globe ; the age in which we live, 
and which was prepared for the develop- 
ment of mankind. The narrative of Moses 
seems to indicate this fact ; for at the end 
of each of the six working days of creation 
we find an evening. But the morning of 
the seventh is not followed by any even- 
ing. The day is still open. When the 
evening shall come the last hour of hu- 
manity will strike. 

This view of the Sabbath of creation 
has been objected to, on account of the 
form of the command in the Decalogue, 
relating to the observance of the Sabbath. 
But those who object, confound God's 
Sabbath with man's Sabbath, and forget 
the words of Christ, that our Sabbath was 



THE SEVENTH DAY. 133 

made for man, who needs it, and not for 
God. God rests as a Creator of the ma- 
terial world only to become active, nay, 
Creator in the spiritual world. His Sab- 
bath work is one of love to man — the re- 
demption. His creation is that of the 
new man, born anew of the Spirit, in the 
heart of the natural man. So man is 
commanded to imitate God in leaving 
once in seven days the work of this 
material world, to turn all his attention 
and devote his powers to the things of 
heaven. 

There are, therefore, three Sabbaths : 

1. God's Sabbath, after the material 
creation. 

2. The Sabbath of humanity, the prom- 
ised millennium, after the toil and struggle 
of the six working days of history. 

3. The Sabbath of the individual, short- 
lived man, the day of rest of twenty- 
four hours, made for him according to 
his measure. 



134 CREATION. 

The length of the clay in each, is of no 
account. The plan, in all, is the same, and 
contains the same idea — six days of work 
and struggle in the material world, followed 
by a day of peace, of rest from the daily 
toil, and of activity in the higher world of 
the spirit. For the Sabbath is not only a 
day of rest, it is the day of the Lord. 

The following tableau, summing up the 
results of the preceding discussion, may be 
found of service in making clear the cor- 
respondence between the record of Moses 
and that of science. 

Whatever be the opinion which we may 
entertain as to the correctness of the his- 
tory of the creation of the universe and 
the earth, such as the present results of in- 
ductive science can furnish, we may affirm 
that the best explanation science is now 
able to give, on this great topic, is also that 
which best explains, in all its details, the 
first chapter of Genesis, and does it justice. 



XVI. 



CONCLUSIONS. 



Such is the grand cosmogonic week de 
scribed by Moses. To a sincere and un- 
prejudiced mind it must be evident that 
these great outlines are the same as those 
which modern science enables us to trace, 
however imperfect and unsettled the data 
afforded by scientific researches may ap- 
pear on many points. 

Whatever modifications in our present 
view of the development of the universe 
and the globe may be expected from new 
discoveries, the prominent features of this 
vast picture will remain, and these only 
are delineated in this admirable account 
of Genesis. 

These outlines were sufficient for the 



136 CEEATION. 

moral purposes of the book ; the scientific 
details are for us patiently to investigate. 
They were, no doubt, unknown to Moses ; 
as the details of the life and of the work 
of the Saviour were unknown to the great 
prophets, who announced his coming and 
traced out with master hand his character 
and mission, centuries before his appear- 
ance on the earth. 

But the same divine hand which lifted, 
for Daniel and Isaiah, the veil which 
covered the tableau of the time to come, 
unveiled to the eyes of the author of 
Genesis, by a series of graphic visions and 
pictures, the earliest ages of the creation. 
Thus Moses was the prophet of the past, 
as Daniel and Isaiah and many others 
were the prophets of the future. 



THE END. 



H 

o 



U So 

© 



© 

© 

rP 

M | 

H ° 
W ^ 

P 



J, be 

rtrl c 

<H re © 

eS> 

PhcS 

dfto 

O e3,P 
c3J3 O 

•& H3 © 
pji: o 
©"© 5 

p B «> 

O ©^ 

°S? 

§ n « 

. O 0> _ 

•I blf I 

^ % p a 



.goo 
"S M p 

•5 -P 1- ' o 









PX e8 2 >2 
















. O p ftp* 

£ - 5 o * 
JIBE'S 






ito 8 

rmati 

mica] 

nd at 

Fir 




DC 

o 
+3 


centrate i 
3 star. Fo 
rth by che 
tie ocean, a 
ns ; a sun. 




a 

c 

"o 
E 

"J 


■■J 


So" .-T.S 





s 



T3 ©"£ "n o to j 

0>rC _» ^ p g P ! 

05 w 2 t< S ' 

ffl « d ffl h a 2 i 

PgSS^dO 
O 5 h p ^45 m 

S p a g 2 8^ 



s^h s 



n3 

a 

ta 

DO 

© 

p . 

'-+3 Pi 

e£ 

cc'S" 
co w 

© © 
P o 

c3 d> 

"o-Q 
cc-P 

rS P 
^ CO 

,P c3 



P 

© .^ CD 

P^ 



£ 


S 


rP 


1 


bJQ-c 


A 


<u 




J 


Ti 


+J 


u 







o 


© 


* 


fr 








i-l 


o 




-p 


© 




h-3 


Ti 






H3 


ti 


DO 




.<TJ 


<y 


feo 











^^ 






o 

• S E 

^O 

cS co 
P.P 

© (O, 
© CD 
^ <D 

rP 

. ©^ 

^ s s 

i^ P p, 
© o £ x 
pO S © 
■^ ■§ © 

O fj !>+> 



©Ti 

^.-^ 

rp CD 
P^ 
^^ 

52 



^5 

T3"S 
'i © 



T3 c3 
. O fcD . 

Ph 

p p. 



-5s 






aifcj © 

© >> 

.2.215 ™ 

52 « o 

§§§ 1 

oil £ 



E © ! 



a ^ g 

d8~' 



3 S 



■siHf 

■-§ 2*8 2-3 

j a: -o o a 
.2 3 P SJ 1 
8 2 8*1 






© © J, 

£5 8 



« § 3 

j|.&2 
£ 2^G 

.a&j^ 

G (U-^TJ 
OJ ©T3 

.a cs -»=> o 

rf ©.=« 

1X1 G^ 



2^ g 

a ■ g 
•"2^3 

©^ 

Sift 



ft^ to 



_5 I m o 

ai 00 G 

S"©-- J .2 



an 

'3 » 



a5 ■*• 

-3 i s . 

o Z u 10 

7. a 'I k? 

2^£ 2 

'I fl - H 2 

S3 .5 

g H to c3 

8:1* 

^ « g C 



j^W 2 



fi' 



^2 

Q 






«3l 

03 ? g 

^ 2 >» 

■d g ^ 

o ° © 

,G ■*= > 
o o3 © 

1-d 

--- to 

© e3 -£ 

O 0r d 

-*3 G°3 



2^ § 

« r5 co S 

^ _ & ei 

■< G to ? 
,-5 



^ 



©-3 



s.g .s 

m OS 

a 



^3 o 



o 
eg 

a Go 

Ts'23'd 



bflS 



2° 

O 0) 
© . 

us 
as 



a 

e8 
© 



G 
© 

© 
ca 

© 

-G 

-»3 



G 

-=> n • ° 

1 s^S 

11*1 



THEBEGINNINGSOFHISTOR\ 

According to the Bible and the Traditions of the Oriental Peoples. From 
the Creation of Man to the Deluge. By Francois Lenormant, 
Professor of Archceology at the National Library of France, etc. 
(Translated from the Second French Edition). With an introduction 
by Francis Brown, Associate Professor in Biblical Philology, 
Union Theological Seminary. 



1 Vol., 12mOn 600 pages, - $2.50. 



" "What should we see in the first chapters of Genesis ? " writes M. Lenor- 
mant in his preface — "'A revealed narrative, or a human tradition, gathered 
up for preservation by inspired writers as the oldest memory of their race ? 
This is the problem which I have been led to examine by comparing the nar- 
rative of the Biblo with those which were current among the civilized peo- 
ples of most ancient origin by which Israel was surrounded, and from the 
midst of which it came." 

The bo^.k is not more erudite than it is absorbing in its interest. It has 
had an immense influence upon contemporary thought ; and has approached 
its task with a:, unusual mingling of the reverent and the scientific spirit. 



M That the ' Oriental Peoples ' had legends on the Creation, the Fall of Man, the 
Deluge, and other primitive events, there is no denying. Nor is there any need o: 
denying it, as this admirable volume shows. Mr. Lencrmant is not only a believer 
in revelation, but a devout confessor of what came by Moses ; as well as of what came 
by Christ. In this explanation of Chaldean, Babylonian, Assyrian and Phenician 
tradition, he discloses a prodigality of thought and skill allied to great variety of pur- 
suit, and diligent manipulation of what he has secured. He k spoils the Egyptians ' 
by boldly using for Christian purposes materials, which, if left unused, might be 
turned against the credibility of the Mosaic records. 

" From the mass of tradition here examined it would seem that if these ancient 
legends have a common basis of truth, the first part of Genesis stands more generally 
related to the religious history of mankind, than if it is taken primarily as one account, 
by one man, to one people. . . . While not claiming for the „.uthor the 
setting forth of the absolute truth, nor the drawing from what he has set forth the 
soundest conclusions, we can assure our readers of a diminishing fear of learned un- 
belief after the perusal of this work." — The New Englander. 

" With reference to the book as a whole it maybe said : (i). That nowhere else can 
one obtain the mass of information upon this subject in so convenient a form; (2). That 
the investigation is conducted in a truly scientific manner, and with an eminently 
Christian spirit ; (3). That the results, though very different from those in common 
acceptance, contain much that is interesting and to say the least, plausible ; (4I. That 
ths author while he seems in a number of cases to be injudicious in his state- 
ment? and conclusions, has done work in investigation and in working out details that 
will be of service to all, whether general readers or specialists." — The Hebrew 
Student. 

'' The work is one that deserves to be studied by all students of ancient history, and 
Jn particular by ministers of the Gospel, whose office requires them to interpret the 
Scriptures, and who ought not to be ignorant of the latest and most interesting con- 
tribution of science to the elucidation to the sacred volume."— New York Tribune. 



* # * For Sale by all booksellers, or sent, post-paid, upon receipt 0/ price, 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers, 

743 and 745 Broadway, New York 



Final Causes. 

By PAUL JAN"ET. 

MEMBER OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY. 

Translated from the Second French Editio?i. With a Preface by 
Robert Flint, D.D., LL.D. 



One Vol. 8vo., -.%-■- Price, $2.50 



" Here is a book to which we give the heartiest welcome and the study of 
which — not reading merely — we commend to all who are seeking to solve the question 
whether the universe is the product of mind or of chance. . . . Perhaps no living 
author has been more thoroughly trained by previous studies for the work done here 
than Mr. Janet; and no one is better fitted for it by original gifts." — Universalist 
Quarterly. 

44 1 regard 'Janet's Final Causes' as incomparably the best thing in litera- 
ture on the subject of which it treats, and that it ought to be in the hands of every 
man who has any interest in the present phases of the theistic problem. I am very 
glad that you have brought out an edition for the American public and at a price 
that makes the work acceptable to ministers and students. I have commended it to 
my classes in the seminary, and make constant use of it in my instructions." — From 
a letter of Professor Francis L. Patton, D. D. 

" I am delighted that you have published the translation of Janet's ' Final 
Causes ' in an improved form and at a price which brings it within the reach of many 
who desire to possess it. It is in my opinion the most suggestive treatise on this im- 
portant topic which is accessible in our language, and is admirably fitted to meet 
many of the misleading and superficial tendencies of the philosophy of a popular 
but superficial school." — Extract from a letter of Noa/i Porter, D.D., LL.D., 
Preside?it of Yale College. 

" The most powerful argument that has yet appeared against the unwar- 
ranted conclusions which Haeckel and others would draw from the Darwinian 
Theory. That teleology and evolution are not mutually exclusive theories, M. 
Janet has demonstrated with a vigor and keenness that admit of no reply." — The 
Examiner. 

44 No book of greater importance in the realm of theological philosophy has 
appeared during the past twenty years than Paul Janet's k Final Causes.' The 
central idea of the work is one which the whole course of scientific discussion has 
made the burning question of the day, viz : That final causes are not inconsistent 
with physical causation." — Independent, 



*** F° r sa ^ e ty a ^ booksellers, or sent, post-paid, upon receipt of price, by 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers, 

743 and 745 Broadway, New York. 



The Conflicts of the ^4ge. 



One Vol., 8vo, - Paper, 50 Cts. ; Cloth, 75 Cts. 



The four articles which make up this little volume are ■ 

(1) An Advertisement for a New Religion. By an Evolutionist. 

(2) The Confession of an Agnostic. By an Agnostic. 

(3) What Morality have we left ? By a New-Light Moralist. 

(4) Review of the Fight. By a Yankee Farmer. 

The secret of its authorship has not yet transpired, and the reviewers 
seem badly puzzled in their attempts to solve the mystery. 



CRITICAL NOTICES. 

•• Nowhere can an ordinary reader see in a more simple and pleasing form the 
absurdities which lie in the modern speculations about truth and duty. We have no key 
to the authorship, but the writer evidently holds a practiced pen, and knows how to give 
that air of fiersijlage in treating of serious subjects which sometimes is more effective 
than the most cogent dialectic/' — Christian Intelligencer. 

"It is the keenest, best sustained exposure of the weaknesses inherent in certain 
schools of modern thought, which we have yet come across, and is couched in a vein of 
fine satire, making it exceedingly readable. For an insight into the systems it touches 
upon, and for its suggestions oi methods of meeting then), it is capable of being a great 
help to the clergy. It is a new departure in apologetics, quite in the spirit of the time." — 
The Living Church. 

"The writer has chosen to appear anonymously; but he holds a pen keen as a 
Damascus blade. Indeed, there are few men living capable of writing these papers, 
and of dissecting so thoroughly the popular conceits and shams of the day. It is done, 
too. with a coolness, self-possession, and sang-froid, that are inimitable, however un- 
comfortable -it may seem to the writhing victims." — The Guardian. 

" These four papers are unqualifiedly good. They show a thorough acquaintance 
with the whole range of philosophic thought in its modern phases of development, even 
down to the latest involutions and convolutions of the Evolutionists, the sage unknow- 
ableness of the Agnostic, and the New Light novelty of Ethics without a conscience." — 
Lutheran Chun.fi Review. 

" These papers are as able as thev are readable, and are not offensive in their spirit, 
beyond the necessary offensiveness of belief to the believing mind. *' — N. Y. Christian 
Advocate. 

"The discussion is sprightly, incisive, and witty; and whoever begins to read it 
will be likely to read it through."^iW7« Englandcr. 



*** For sale by all booksellers, or sent, postpaid, upon receipt of 
frice, by 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers, 

743 and 745 Broadway, New York. 



OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF 

among the Indo-European Eaces, 

By CHARLES FRANCIS KEARY, M.A., 

of the British Museum. 



One vol. crown 8vo., - $2.50, 

Mr. Keary's Book is not simply a series of essays in comparative myth- 
ology, it is a history of the legendary beliefs of the Indo-European races 
drawn from their language and literature. Mr. Keary has no pet theory to 
establish ; he proceeds in the spirit of the inquirer after truth simply, and 
his book is a rare example of patient research and unbiased opinion in a most 
fascinating field of exploration. 

" We have an important and singularly interesting contribution to our knowledge 
of pre-historic creeds in the Outlines of pre-historic Belief among the Indo- European. 
Races^ by Mr. C. F. Keary, of the British Museum. No contemporary essayist in 
the field of comparative mythology — and we do not except Max Miiller — has known 
how to embellish and illumine a work of scientific aims and solid worth with so much 
imaginative power and literary charm. There are chapters in this volume that are as 
persuasive as a paper of MattheAV Arnold's, as delightful as a poem. The author is 
not only a trained inquirer but he presents the fruits of his research with the skill and 
felici' / of an artist." — Neiv York Sun. 

^ Air. Keary, having unusual advantages in the British Museum for studying 
comparative philology has gone through all the authorities concerning Hindoo, 
Greek, early Norse, modern European, and other forms of faith in their early stages, 
and there has never before been so thorough and so captivating an exposition of them 
as that given in this book." — Philadelphia Bulletin. 

THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

AN INTRODUCTION TO PRE-HISTORIC STUDY. 
Edited by C. F. KEARY, M.A., 

OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM. 



One Volume, 12mo., - $1.25. 

This work treats successively of the earliest traces of man in the re- 
mains discovered in caves or elsewhere in different parts of Europe ; of 
language, its growth, and the story it tells of the pre-historic users of it ; of 
the races of mankind, early social life, the religions, mythologies, and folk- 
tales of mankind, and of the history of writing. A list of authorities is 
appended, and an index has been prepared specially for this edition. 



" The book may be heartily recommended as probably the most satisfactory 
summary of the subject that there is."— Nation. 

" A fascinating manual, without a vestige of the dullness usually charged against 
scientific works. „ . . In its way, the work is a model of what a popular scientific 
work should be ; it is readable, it is easily understood, and its style is simple, yet dig 
nified, avoiding equally the affection of the nursery and of the laboratory." — 

Boston Sat. Eve. Gazette 

*#* For sale by all booksellers, or sent, post-paid, upon receipt of 
price, by 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers, 

743 and 745 Broadway, New York. 



